Curator Meena Vari sees Abu Dhabi as a city of discoveries.
After spending more than two decades in Bangalore, Vari moved to the UAE and found herself noticing the details that shape daily life here: apartment balconies, desert plants, old buildings, changing skylines and the quiet rituals through which people begin to understand a place.
Shafeena Yusuff Ali, founder and executive director of Rizq Art Initiative, says those same details carry a different kind of familiarity. She grew up in Abu Dhabi and has watched the city transform across decades.
The meeting of those two perspectives forms the basis of Under the Same Sky, RAi’s latest exhibition at its gallery on Reem Island.
Running until July 31, the exhibition brings together 20 UAE-based artists whose works respond to the country through memory, landscape, architecture, material culture and everyday observation. Some were born and raised here. Others arrived later. Together, they build a layered portrait of the UAE as a place shaped by movement, belonging and constant change.
“I come to this as a newer resident,” Vari tells The National. “Abu Dhabi is new for me. I'm trying to see how the place excites me and what it is teaching me.”
The exhibition, she says, began with that sense of arrival. Vari had travelled widely from India but had never lived anywhere else until she came to the UAE.
“That gave me the thought: what if I bring in artists and ask them to respond in a similar way? How are they going to respond? That's where the whole idea began.”
The answer is deliberately varied. Under the Same Sky does not attempt to present one neat image of the country. Instead, it allows each artist to locate their own point of connection, whether through a place, an object, a plant, a family memory or a small act of daily life.
One of the works that anchor the exhibition is by Emirati artist Sara Al Sulaimani, who responds to an old image of Abu Dhabi’s Corniche. The piece captures not only a physical location, but the emotional charge of a city many residents remember in fragments.
During a tour of the exhibition, the work prompts recollections of the Volcano Fountain.
“That was the meeting point in the middle of the Corniche,” Vari says. “Everyone gathered there.”
For those who grew up in the capital, such references need little explanation. They carry with them the memory of an Abu Dhabi that has been built over, expanded and reimagined, but not entirely lost.
That sense of recognition also runs through a work by Pakistani artist Rabila Kidwai, which is one of Ali’s favourites in the show. The piece reflects on the simple act of drying clothes in a balcony-less apartment, a domestic scene familiar to many families who have lived in the UAE.
“It's such a simple concept,” Ali says. “It's something many UAE kids can relate to.”
Ali says that familiarity is part of the exhibition’s strength. A scene that may seem ordinary becomes a shared cultural marker, particularly in a country where many people’s memories of home are formed in apartment buildings, rented rooms and rapidly changing neighbourhoods.
The same theme of belonging appears in more personal ways elsewhere in the exhibition.
Palestinian-American artist Tala Atrouni, who has lived in the UAE for nearly two decades, uses tatreez embroidery and a found mirror in a work that reflects on identity and self-perception. Vari says a conversation with the artist touched on the complexity of passports, movement and belonging, and on the UAE as a place where Atrouni felt accepted as an Arab.
Other artists look to the country’s landscape and natural forms. Maitha Al Omaira works with cyanotype, using sunlight and time to create images that connect with the sky. Karine Roche responds to the mangroves and desert rose formations, while Simrin Mehra-Agarwal looks to the coral reefs of Saadiyat Island.
Architecture also appears throughout the exhibition. Shamma Al Mazrouei draws from older architectural forms, while Shamsa Al Mansoori looks at gates, walls and familiar structural features. Found objects from Mussafah act as starting points for works that think about transience and place.
Vari says Mussafah holds a particular conceptual weight. She describes it as a kind of in-between space where objects pass through, are repurposed, discarded or given new life.
That idea is picked up in the work of several artists. A Maltese artist responds to a found chair, while another artist working with archival material looks at old flags and early symbols of the UAE after the Union.
These gestures sit alongside works that bring other cultural traditions into dialogue with the UAE. Iranian artists Elham Shafaei, Farah Soltani and Zahra Shafie approach the theme through carpets, abstraction and self-reflection, while Palestinian artist Dina Nazmi Khorchid uses textiles to consider water, oil and the oceans.
The strength of the exhibition lies in how these works are allowed to sit beside one another without being forced into a single reading. Their differences are the point.
“Every artist has their own way of responding to the prompt,” Ali says. “How do you bring all of these different perspectives into one city? That's what Abu Dhabi and the UAE do so beautifully.”
That idea also reflects the wider purpose of Rizq Art Initiative, which Ali founded in 2023 as an independent, artist-led social enterprise. The organisation has quickly become part of Abu Dhabi’s growing art ecosystem, with a focus on exhibitions, research, interdisciplinary projects and support for emerging artists.
Ali says mentorship is a major part of RAi’s work, particularly through Scene/Seen, its annual platform for young artists with less than five years of practice. The exhibition usually opens shortly before Ramadan and continues through it.
“We usually receive between 120 and 180 applications, and from those the curator selects about 20 to 22 artists,” she says.
Many of those artists are showing for the first time. Some have gone on to build deeper relationships with the gallery.
“Mentorship and support are a huge part of what we do as an organisation,” Ali says. “We've been able to provide that, which is why young artists enjoy working with us and creating work with us.”
Under the Same Sky feels like an extension of that ethos. It is not only about showing artists who live in the UAE, but also about asking what living here does to an artist’s way of seeing.
After leading several tours of the exhibition, Ali says she noticed that visitors were drawn to different works for different reasons.
“Everybody likes different pieces because they connect themselves either to the artist or to the work,” she says.
That may be the most fitting way to experience the exhibition. It does not ask viewers to accept one definition of belonging. Instead, it invites them to look across the room and recognise something of their own UAE, whether in a balcony, a building, a family memory, an old photograph or a patch of sky.
