Unstable Grounds: How NYUAD fine art graduates find clarity in ambiguity

Exhibition has themes of disappearance, distortion and reclamation

Mowen Li, also known as Amira, is one of the artists taking part in Unstable Grounds, the NYUAD MFA graduate exhibition. All photos: Antonie Robertson / The National

Artist Dima Abou Zannad

Artist Safeya Sharif

Artist Bao

Artist Hala El Abora

Artist Adele Bea Cipste

Artist Jude Maharmeh

Artist Danute Vaitekunaite

For the fine art graduates at NYU Abu Dhabi who are showcasing their work, art is an act of searching – a wrestling with materials for meaning.

Titled Unstable Grounds, the exhibition running at 421 Arts Campus until September is layered – a constellation of practices that reveal not just what is shown, but also what resists visibility.

One arresting example that deals with that idea is Consequences of Circumstance by Hala El Abora. Images of birds, neither definitely dead nor alive, are carved on slabs of stone, disrupting the historical trope of the bird as a symbol of beauty and freedom. Instead, they become “omens and casualties”, suspended in unease.

“Their state is ambiguous, so when the viewer is confronted by them, they're questioning whether the birds are asleep or in flight,” El Abora says. “I needed it to be on stone, so they’re carved on granite. The weight needed to be heavy and the viewer had to be aware of it.”

Work by Hala El Abora. Antonie Robertson / The National

Surrounding this is a series of other works, including darkroom prints made on handblown glass from Jordan, a technique, El Abora says, that has never been applied in the UAE. As such, the glass becomes a lens of transformation, where archival images are distorted, not clarified.

Themes of disappearance, distortion and reclamation recur throughout the exhibition. Adele Bea Cipste explores her evolving relationship to Abu Dhabi’s shoreline across several works in her installation The Sea is a Body Which Moves. These include ink-on-paper works drawn from trips over the past few years that come as a kind of emotional cartography.

“Each panel is a dedication to a particular trip or a site,” Cipste says. “Each one is a ink painting on paper by gradually building up the layers so they're actually not prints, they're drawings. The lines that are cutting through some of them signify the horizon.”

Horizon lines are a motif throughout the exhibition, acting as both a literal marker and a conceptual anchor, a way to orient oneself in an urban landscape constantly in motion. “So even though it's a very simple line, to me it holds a lot of conceptual meaning within the piece,” Cipste says.

Other works draw from maritime safety maps, rendering them as a source for abstracted drawings. Reassembled and scrambled, the maps form a parallel between cartographic order and personal disorientation.

If Cipste looks towards Abu Dhabi’s waters as a personal touchstone, Jude Maharmeh draws from the capital’s urban aspect. Clay tiles, hand-cut and incised, are arranged on a pedestal to resemble rubble from a distance. Up close, their alignment reveals an intentional order, an embedded logic within the initial chaos.

The piece, titled Gridlines, plays with scale, perspective and material familiarity, transforming Abu Dhabi’s gridded urban fabric into something more tactile and fragile.

Gridlines by Jude Maharmeh uses handmade clay tiles. Antonie Robertson / The National

“I come from an architectural background, so a lot of my interests have to do with the built environment, and specifically Abu Dhabi because I've grown up here my entire life,” Maharmeh says. “These are 110 handmade clay tiles. They all start with the same first incision, but they all grew into individual designs.”

Nearby, UV-printed works on aluminium and tempered glass extend this exploration. Based on blurry photographs of building facades taken while driving, the works echo the fragmented way we perceive the city through windshields and motion.

Safeya Sharif, meanwhile, challenges traditions of framing. By using masking tape, she goads the viewer to reconsider what the frame is and what is being framed. Wooden frames with bare fawn canvasses are merely an element in the blue rectangle of the masking tape.

“It’s about bodily experience and interaction, which I think the tape does on its own,” Sharif says. “Artists would say the tape is ephemeral and fragile. Others would say it is very territorial.”

Safeya Sharif challenges the traditional framing of artworks. Antonie Robertson / The National

Some works question the limitations of materials, form and meaning. Danute Vaitekunaite, Mowen Li and Bao all examine their personal histories while experimenting with materials.

Their works, often sprawling, room-filling installations, show how we assign importance to the objects that proliferate our daily lives – from Laban Up cartons and apples to shawls typically seen in souqs.

Finally, Dima Abou Zannad’s work presents a stripped view of these material experimentations. The work, So tell me, do the dead long for mourning?, pivots around the story of the Sacrificial Lamb found across Abrahamic religions.

The work comprises illustrations of lambs scrawled on the wall, book collections as well as personal writings, all of which provide insight into our process of mythologising, ascribing meaning and the tension between individual and collective semantics.

“I am obsessed with how meaning is formed,” Abou Zannad says. “Over the past year, I have been thinking about it alongside my practice of writing and silence. I was trying to identify what I was feeling about silence. I realised it was a taut muteness I was thinking about, not silence. The story of the lamb popped in my mind then.”

The installation goes on to loosely connect a thread between the story and the state of muteness, referencing other popular stories and symbols in the process, including The Little Mermaid.

“The theme of sacrifice is used in different forms,” Abou Zannad says. “This is my way of exploring that. You have an installation in both corners that has a curated collection of books.

“People can read through my notes, my investigation, and sometimes they can be hard to grasp, but the point is that I’m trying to make a mark and that mark can also be seen as a matter of life and death.”

The range of practices featured in Unstable Grounds reflects upon the nature of the master of fine arts at NYU Abu Dhabi. The programme, founded in 2021, is unlike any other in the region, opting for an interdisciplinary approach that is rooted in studio practice and academic rigour.

“Students come to us from all over the world, particularly from the region,” says Tina Sherwell, co-director of the master of fine arts programme. She adds that the students benefit from regular critiques by visiting curators and artists, including delegations from Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Sharjah Art Foundation, Art Jameel, and others. They also have the opportunity to travel, present work and collaborate internationally, including at the Venice Biennale and across NYU’s global network.

The ambitious results are on full display in Unstable Grounds. The works are conceptual and technically rigorous, by artists whose practices are driven by intellectual curiosity, material risk and deeply personal inquiry.

“We have faculty who are from film and new media, from art and art history, from theatre, from creative writing, from anthropology,” Sherwell says. “It's a very interdisciplinary programme, and it emphasises developing their individual projects and their own research.”

Until September 7; free; 421 Arts Campus, Mina Zayed, Abu Dhabi