More than 110 works by 47 UAE-based artists have gone on show at the Seoul Museum of Art in South Korea, in the largest presentation of contemporary art from the Emirates staged in East Asia.
The landmark exhibition, titled Proximities and created in collaboration with the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation, aims to foster cultural exchange while spotlighting the UAE’s diverse artistic scene.
Proximities forms part of the Abu Dhabi Festival Abroad programme and represents the second chapter of a three-year institutional collaboration between the Seoul museum and Admaf.
In March 2025, a showcase of South Korean art was presented at Manarat Al Saadiyat and the responding exhibition – co-curated by Maya El Khalil and Eunju Kim – traces 50 years of UAE cultural production, shaped by migration, rapid urban transformation and evolving social structures.
Divided into three themed sections, developed with UAE artists acting as sub-curators, the exhibition invites visitors into the domestic, public and imagined worlds of the Emirates. Together, these sections explore how geographic and cultural “proximities” can be celebrated in an era of globalised homogeneity. The curators consider how connections can be formed across difference, while cultural identities remain distinct.
“The main question we’re asking here is: ‘What does it mean to be near?’ – not only in place, but in customs and ideas, in time as well as geography,” El Khalil tells The National. “One way we approached this was by presenting a multiplicity of voices, and what better way to do that than by inviting artists to curate sections of the exhibition with us?”
She adds: “The first section is curated by photographer Farah Al Qasimi. The second is curated by Mohammed Kazem and Cristiana de Marchi, and the third by the artistic collective RRH – Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian. Together, they reflect three different generations in the UAE, seen through how artists encounter and position themselves in the world.”
Domestic spaces and memory
In the first section, A Place for Turning, Al Qasimi channels the aesthetic of domestic interiors in the Emirates during the 1990s and early 2000s. Through Al Qasimi's own photography alongside installations by other artists, the section reveals intimate, homely scenes usually hidden from public view – miniature alternate realities that feel familiar yet subtly dissonant.
Themes of mythology, folktales, escapism and nostalgia recur across the works, including Rand Abdul Jabbar’s May It Be Remembered, a video installation accompanied by mud sculptures that unfold a deeply personal narrative.
“The work emerged from a chance encounter with archival family footage of a visit to the ancient city of Hatra in Iraq, known as the City of the Sun,” Abdul Jabbar says. “That encounter led me to uncover the layered histories embedded in the site, from its geological origins to its recent occupation by ISIS. The installation weaves together historic and personal narratives to explore how land carries memory across time.”
She adds: “A series of mud sculptures, made from bricks traditionally used for heritage preservation in Al Ain, come to life in the accompanying film alongside a narrative text I wrote. The sun, salt and earth recur as key characters – witnessing and shaping events. The title draws from a common inscription on statues from Hatra, reflecting the culture’s deep value of remembrance.”
In contrast, Jumairy’s participatory installation Comma, In Arabic presents an eerie futuristic wasteland of neon-pink sand. The Pantone 213 shade – often associated with Barbie imagery and breast cancer awareness – becomes a desolate desertscape, imagined as a graveyard for a virtual world.
In Arabic, “comma” can be translated as “barzakh”, meaning a space or barrier or separation. In Islamic scripture, it also refers to the realm between the world of the living and the afterlife. Jumairy uses this wordplay to explore a possible limbo for the intangible.
“The installation is about the space between life and death,” he says. “At first, you don’t realise it’s interactive, which creates its own vacuum of sound. I started speculating about what happens to technology when it dies, and imagined it might resemble a desert.
“When you walk through the sand, trigger points activate sounds representing a dying AI entering this liminal space. The more people there are, the louder it becomes – mirroring how overstimulation from technology and the virtual world intensifies.”
Migration and distance
The second section, Recording Distance, Not Topography, explores migration and shifting social and geographic boundaries, tracing questions of belonging and displacement through large-scale installations.
Rather than mapping terrain, the works chart emotional and political distances, questioning how borders are formed and what can be revealed in states of transition. Among the first works encountered is Tarek Elkassouf’s Where Are You From?, which presents dozens of stone compasses as metaphors for individual journeys of self-discovery, ideas of home and emotional growth.
Kazem’s contributions include the multimedia installation The Window, which examines the often-overlooked lives of migrant labourers on UAE building sites. In Directions (Merging), co-ordinates drawn in sand are repeatedly erased by waves, scattering what is “known” in uncertain directions.
Civic and cultural builders
The third chapter, That Thing, Amphibian, centres on works created around or after the UAE’s 50th National Day – December 2, 2021. It focuses on artists who operate independently and within civic cultural institutions. They not only create work, but actively shape the country’s cultural infrastructure.
Among them is Shaikha Al Ketbi, creative director of the Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation. She presents a series of dystopian video works, including one in which she appears in a bathtub in the middle of the desert, and another showing her playing in an abandoned park in Abu Dhabi.
“This park in Sweihan was very popular in the 1980s – one of the biggest at the time – but it no longer exists,” Al Ketbi says. “I perform as a character interacting with the objects in a ritualistic way, using swings without seats, creating a feeling of presence and absence, almost like a parallel universe.”
She adds: “These are shown alongside footage from the UAE’s 50th National Day performance I helped create for Es Devlin’s large-scale production at Hatta Dam. Together, they reflect how artists today often occupy fluid roles.”
Proximities concludes with Ayman Zedani’s The Desert Keepers, an immersive work centred on a parasitic desert plant that absorbs experiences from each host it encounters. While the piece does not suggest the viewer becomes a parasite, it points towards the value of widening one’s horizons – absorbing something new from each person and culture we encounter.
