Proximities

Curated by Maya El Khalil & Eunju Kim

Overview

Contemporary Art from the United Arab Emirates  

‍Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation (ADMAF) and Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) present Proximities as part of Abu Dhabi Festival, a landmark exhibition concluding 2025 and ushering in 2026.

Following the resounding success of Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits, which brought Korean new media artists to Abu Dhabi and garnered significant attention in Spring 2025, open until 29 March 2026 at Seoul Museum of Art, Proximities features more than 110 artworks by 47 UAE-based artists, including 33 Emiratis. It marks the largest presentation to date in Korea highlighting contemporary art from the United Arab Emirates.

Curated by Maya El Khalil and Eunju Kim, the milestone exhibition explores how artistic perspectives become forms of proximity – ways of sensing and processing transformation across domestic, social and geopolitical scales. The exhibition presents ways of encountering the world that emerge from contexts shaped by compressed modernisation and accelerated development. Meeting Seoul’s cultural landscape, Proximities reveals shared experiences between the UAE and Korea – tracing parallel negotiations of the local and the global and between tradition and futurity.

Curatorial Statement

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.

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Artists

Abdul Qader Al Rais
Abdullah Al Saadi
Alaa Edris  
Ala Younis  
Aliyah Al Awadhi  
Almaha Jaralla  
Ammar Al Attar  
Afra Al Dhaheri  
Ayesha Hadhir  
Ayman Zedani  
Cristiana De Marchi  
Ebtisam Abdulaziz  
Farah Al Qasimi  
Fatma Al Ali  
Hazem Harb  
Hassan Sharif  
Hussein Sharif  
Jumairy  
Khalid Seddiq  
Kholoud Sharafi  
Layan Attari  
Maitha Abdalla  
Maitha Al Omaira  
Maitha Ali  
Mohamed Al Mazrouei  
Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim  
Mohammed Kazem  
Moza Almatrooshi  
Najat Makki  
Nujoom Al Ghanem  
Rajaa Khalid  
Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Hesam Rahmanian  
Rand Abdul Jabbar  
Rashed Qurwash  
Rawdha Al Ketbi  
Rayan Al Jneibi  
Sara Al Haddad  
Shaikha Al Ketbi  
Shaikha Al Mazrou  
Shamma Al Amri  
Shamma Al Bastaki  
Tarek Al-Ghoussein  
Tarek ElKassouf  
Vikram Divecha  
Vivek Vilasini

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