Weekly UAE museum and gallery guide: Young Emirati photographer gets first solo show
This week's exhibitions chart new geographies, both literally and metaphorically. From remote mountains and rural farmlands to imagined terrains, the featured shows reflect shifting grounds, whether beneath our feet or within our collective consciousness.
Here are three exhibitions to see this week.
Everyman's Mountain, by Omar Al Gurg at Lawrie Shabibi
Emirati photographer and designer Omar Al Gurg is presenting his first solo show with Everyman's Mountain. The exhibition at Lawrie Shabibi features 24 archival prints from a six-day trek up Kilimanjaro in 2021. From misty forests and regenerating moorlands to the fragile icy summit, Al Gurg's work shows the mountain as a shifting ecosystem, shaped by nature and human activity.
The exhibition is as much a personal odyssey as it is a broader environmental mediation, a tribute to nature's quiet transformations and our collective duty to preserve them.
Monday to Saturday, 10am-6pm; until September 12; Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai
The Peasant, the Scholar and the Engineer, by Asuncion Molinos Gordo at Jameel Arts Centre
Spanish artist-researcher Asuncion Molinos Gordo's first major retrospective in West Asia surveys 15 years of her work on rural knowledge, land use and food systems.
Gordo's work draws on anthropology and cultural studies. It reframes farmers as not only food producers, but also intellectuals and engineers. Their vernacular practices, she points out, may hold keys to sustainability.
Works that are being featured in the exhibition include her famous World Agriculture Museum, which was first staged in Cairo in 2010 and won the Sharjah Biennial Prize in 2015. Another highlight is Como Soliamos, a 2020 rammed-earth installation echoing Andalusian and falaj irrigation techniques.
Saturday to Monday, Wednesday to Thursday, 10am-8pm; Friday; noon-8pm; until September 28; Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai
Unstable Grounds, at 421 Arts Campus
In Unstable Grounds, the MFA graduate exhibition from NYU Abu Dhabi at 421, art becomes an act of placemaking – a wrestling with materials in search of meaning. The show is layered and searching, a constellation of practices that reveal not just what is shown, but also what resists visibility.
The exhibition features the work of eight artists, exploring themes of the environment, displacement, memory and human connection, through installation, performance, video, sculpture and print.
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For the fine arts graduates at NYU Abu Dhabi who are showcasing their work, art is an act of placemaking – a wrestling with materials in search of meaning. Titled Unstable Grounds, the exhibition running at 421 Arts Campus until September is layered and searching – a constellation of practices that reveal not just what is shown, but 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 confronted by their state and is questioning whether they are asleep or in flight,' El Abora says. 'They're carved on granite, and I needed it to be on stone. The weight needed to be heavy and the viewer had to be aware of it.' 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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 alongside my practice of writing and silence. I was trying to identify what I was feeling about silence. I realised it was a tautly 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 Sherwel l, 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. They have also been wrote 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, very interdisciplinary programme, and it emphasises developing their individual projects and their own research.'
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