PROXIMITIES

Curated by Maya El Khalil & Eunju Kim

Presented by Seoul Museum of Art & ADMAF as part of Abu Dhabi Festival

Opening at Seoul Museum of Art in December 2025, Proximities brings together more than 40 artists from three generations embedded in the rapidly evolving cultural landscape of the United Arab Emirates. Spanning photography, video, painting, sculpture, performance and installation, the exhibition traces shifts in meaning, understanding and cultural exchange. These ways of seeing emerge from productive differences between perspectives shaped across lives, times, and geographies.

Presented by Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation (ADMAF) and Seoul Museum of Art as part of Abu Dhabi Festival, the exhibition examines how different forms of proximity – emotional, geographic, shared cultures and narratives – inform transformations without erasing difference. 

Emphasising the personal and the subjective, the exhibition unfolds across three intimate sections, each developed with artist collaborators and offering a distinct way of encountering the world. Curated by Maya El Khalil and Eunju Kim, the focal points merge and contrast world views from Farah Al Qasimi, Mohammed Kazem, Cristiana de Marchi, and the artist trio Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian (RRH). Their curatorial interventions create worlds into which peers and audiences are invited for reflection, dialogue and discovery.

Farah Al Qasimi's dreamlike photographs appear amid other imagined and surreal domestic spaces, painting a speculative picture of the Emirates from the 1990s to today. Mohammed Kazem and Cristiana de Marchi's meditations on experiences of physical and psychological disorientation are presented alongside large-scale installations exploring memory, displacement, and belonging. RRH organise their intervention around 回 – a square within a square – juxtaposing artefacts of nation-building, art objects from daily environments and elemental matter. In doing so, they dismantle familiar structures of imagination to reveal other possibilities. These perspectives are articulated through works by the late Hassan Sharif, Abdullah Al Saadi, Shaikha Al Mazrou, Ayman Zedani, Nujoom Al Ghanem, Jumairy, Vikram Divecha, Ala Younis and more.

In today's interconnected world, cultures exist in closer proximity than geography alone can map. These three generations of artists – born in the UAE and elsewhere, growing up amid and contributing to the country’s dynamic transformations – navigate between the individual and the collective, the local and the global. Sustaining distinctive stances despite contradictory forces, they mediate the push and pull of the contemporary and the traditional, layering regional contexts with currents of history and emergent futures. Displaced into Seoul's landscape, the works gain new resonance, showing how positions alter and understanding deepens when the familiar encounters the new. As meanings mutate through movement and translation, encounters reshape individual and collective world views.

Proximities is part of a landmark collaboration between ADMAF and Seoul Museum of Art, resulting in two major co-curated exhibitions in 2025: Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits (16 May 2025 – 30 June 2025) in Abu Dhabi, and Proximities (16 December 2025 – 22 February 2026) in Seoul.

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