Hassan Sharif

The Seoul museum of Art and Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation present PROXIMITIES, spotlighting contemporary art from the United Arab Emirates.

PROXIMITIES features more than 40 UAE-based artists, including 33 Emiratis, across three generations – a Gulf nation shaped by the convergences of migration, natural abundance, and rapid urban transformation since its foundation half a century ago. Through three sections, collaboratively developed with artist-curators, the exhibition explores what happens when unstable and subjective worlds – personal, social, urban – come into contact. Scaling from the domestic and imaginary to the geopolitical and the elemental, the artists and curators ask how we can exist in nearness without collapsing into sameness.

In today’s interconnected world, we are configured into proximities that exceed what geography can map. In the immediacy and closeness offered by globalisation, artists work with inherited forms and circulating materials. Between the regionally specific and the internationally legible, this tripartite exhibition considers how ideas evolve through movement and translation - colliding and synthesising views. The three sections propose distinct ways of encountering and seeing: the artist-curators were invited to respond to themes that resonate with their practice; collaborating with curators Maya El Khalil and Eunju Kim, they gathered peers together to develop positions that articulate ways of encountering the world.

Additional works gravitate around each section, creating routes between the artists’ perspectives. These connecting sections become productive intervals where different approaches to cultural navigation emerge. Anchored with a section proposed by photographer Farah Al Qasimi, A Place for Turning is where the familiar and the strange merge. Domestic life unfolds behind walls, creating concurrent realities we cannot see. Imagination sustains interior realms, nurturing new modes and affinities that might meet a changing world. Moving outwards into social orders, Recording Distance, Not Topography, conceived by Mohammed Kazem and Cristiana de Marchi, reckons with spatial relations in flux. Though maps, coordinates, borders, and compasses inscribe power, here, they become unstable, breaking free to diagram alternative formations. Sustaining this mutability, That Thing, Amphibian is a return to the elemental and an evolution into hybridity. The artist trio Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian have organised their collaborations into a structure that comes from the Chinese/Korean character 回 – a square within a square – evoking return, containment, and the interplay of inside and outside. Artists become “amphibians of meaning” as they live simultaneously in two environments.

 Each area of focus proposes a different mode of encounter – everyday fabulation, mapping flux, and amphibious states of reciprocity. These three propositional positions form a constellation rather than separate categories, their ideas flowing between and connecting approaches.