In a photograph from his Abu Dhabi Archipelago series, Tarek Al-Ghoussein sits on top of a slide in an empty children’s playground, staring pensively at the residential compound that barely enters the frame. The image stutters between the peaceful and the haunting. It can be read as an achievement of solitude or an entanglement with loneliness.
The photograph was taken in 2015, when Al-Ghoussein set out to Abu Dhabi’s 215 islands. Instead of taking journalistic approach to documenting the islands, which are mostly either uninhabited or rarely visited, the late photographer put himself in the works, turning the images into performative, autobiographical compositions.
In 2018, Al-Ghoussein presented works from Abu Dhabi Archipelago at 421 Arts Campus. The show was curated by Munira Al Sayegh, who is now revisiting the series in Rays, Ripples, Residue, an exhibition at the institution dedicated to its 10th anniversary.
Al Sayegh presents the works close to their original curation in terms of arrangement, but with a different intent. As the curator of the first segment of Rays, Ripples, Residue, she shows how key instigators, such as Al-Ghoussein, inspired and influenced a new generation of practitioners. It is a potent place from which to begin looking back on a decade of artistic practice in the UAE.
Some of these influences are immediately apparent, such as with the photographs of Khaled Esguerra.
A cohort of 421’s 2025 Artistic Residency Programme, Esguerra photographed his apartment on Al Hisn Street just after it had been cleared out. In one image, the artist sleeps on the tiles in the corner of his old bedroom, where his bed used to be. In another, he stands in the living room looking out a triangular window. The compositions strike a universal cord, that vacuous sensation of emptying a space of everything that made it a home and imagining how it managed to fit a life between its four walls.
The series – titled 1501, 308 Al Hisn Street – has evident similarities with Al-Ghoussein’s work, namely in how the artist employs photography as medium of autobiographical documentation and performance.
How Adele Bea Cipste carries these influences are perhaps less apparent. Her Seascape drawings, which depict on vellum paper ripples of water in pen, are displayed between Al-Ghoussein’s works as well as a 2015 installation by Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim titled Fresh and Salt, which fuses stones from the Caspian Sea and of the artist’s native Khorfakkan in copper wire, emboldening the material as one bringing together two geographies.
The curation is shrewd as it tethers the three disparate bodies of work together, in their shared proximity of the sea. There are also other layers of meaning, namely between Cipste’s and Al-Ghoussein’s works and this consideration of what is being framed and what is being left unseen.
Al Sayegh’s curation of the exhibition’s first section, titled Leading to the Middle, was in itself composed through a biographical lens as Al Sayegh looked at her own practice and the artists she had worked with over the past decade.
In the second segment of the exhibition, Ghosts of Arrival, Nadine Khalil delves into the period from a different perspective. She considers what it was like to enter the scene after the trailblazing moment from the early 2000s to the 2010s.
Yet, the curator nevertheless shows the pioneering spirit of the past decade, showing how the artist-led exhibitions and initiatives continued to resonate well into its latter half. Several artists may have arrived or began practicing after the perceived initial ‘boom,’ but were still shaped by its aftereffects.
The Bait Juma exhibition is a prime example. Held in 2018 at Bait 15, the exhibition presented works by the Juma family of artists, including Shamsa Juma and Aisha Juma. The show explored themes of family and domesticity. At the time, many members of the Juma family did not consider themselves artists, but the exhibition was nevertheless a celebration of the act of making and gathering.
Several of the ceramic works that featured in the original exhibition are now being presented at 421, alongside a photograph of the gathering taken by Hashel Al Lamki that has been enlarged and printed on sheer fabric.
Moving onwards, Khalil spotlights other initiatives from the same period that point to different ways in which artists responded to their surroundings.
One such initiative takes the form of an office-like installation, complete with a meeting table, chairs and a projector casting blue and green hues on to the wall. Pamphlets laid out on the table offer clues to what the installation is alluding to.
Between 2018 and 2019, artists Nadine Ghandour and Mona Ayyash organised a series of day-long exhibitions held in rented office spaces across Dubai. Titled Office Run, the initiative conceptually tackled both the toil and culture of office work, as well as the need for spaces where artists could exhibit video works.
The first of Office Run took place on May 14, 2018, in the Central 1 Building at the Dubai World Trade Centre District. It featured works by three local artists selected through an open call. They included Jumairy, Sara Masinaei, and Karim Sultan.
To display their works, three offices were rented side by side. They were set up almost identically, with two desks forming a square, office chairs arranged around them and a projector placed on the table. A single video work played in each room. It is this arrangement that is shown in Rays, Ripples, Residue.
Finally, the last portion of the exhibition has been curated by Murtaza Vali, and takes its cue from the sun. The works in this segment show how artists use the sun as a medium in itself. In Birthday, for instance, Charbel-Joseph H Boutros presents a blank newspaper page that has been bleached by sunlight, leaving his name visible in a darker hue where a stencil once blocked the exposure.
Other works approach the sun through popular imagery and collective memory. Liham Mula Sa Araw (Letters from the Sun) by the Sa Tahanan Collective engages the figure of Modesh, the Dubai Summer Surprises mascot, pairing visual materials and postcards with a text by Alexandra Chaves that reflects on the character while drawing attention to its creation by the late Romulo Miclat.
Shazia Salam’s Emotional State, meanwhile, centres on a distorted digital image of the character rendered in infrared tones. An accompanying audio work plays comments drawn from a Facebook group dedicated to criticising the mascot, showing a different perspective of how the figure was remembered.
The exhibition’s final work offers a sharp take on the region’s relationship with the sun. In Sunshine, Lantian Xie presents dozens of now-discontinued Al Ain Vitamin D water bottles, drawing attention to the irony of vitamin D deficiency in a place defined by abundant sunlight. Over time, the 2018 work has acquired another layer of meaning. Exposed to heat, the bottles have warped and twisted, their deformation becoming a visible record of the sun’s material impact.
Overall, Rays, Ripples, Residue can be considered as three exhibitions that overlap and inform one another. Each is a unique perspective looking back at the past decade, a period marked by rapid development and new networks in the local cultural scene.
“We chose to have three curators working on this exhibition, with each one with a distinctive point of view and voice,” Faisal Al Hassan, director of 421, says. “We didn't want it to be a co-curated show. Rather we wanted three chapters that showcases how these three key players saw the arts scene in the past 10 years.”
Anniversaries often prompt reflection, and the exhibition has been a means to take stock of how 421 Arts Campus has contributed to the local arts scene, Al Hassan says.
When 421 first opened in 2015, taking shape from an old warehouse in Mina Zayed, it was immediately clear that it heralded something special for Abu Dhabi. The capital was in dire need of an arts hub, not only for emerging and early-career artists, but for the wider public who wanted to engage with art. This was at a time when the constellation of art institutions and galleries were scattered and few. Manarat Al Saadiyat was the only venue on the would-be Cultural District. Many of the area’s projects had not even been announced and while the Louvre was in its final stages of construction, the structure was a mere allusion of what it would become.
421 Arts Campus developed as the scene at large developed. Looking ahead, Al Hassan says he expects the developments to continue and for 421 to remain agile to meet the requirements of the community.
“We’re comfortable with the idea that a programme can change and should change – not because things are not going well,” he says. “Sometimes things are going well, and you still need to keep pushing it. The next five years, what I’m hoping for, is constant change.”
