COMMENTARY

The Infinite PossibilIties of a Turning Heart

Where survival demands movement, and transformation begins from within

ANNA SEAMAN

MAR 31, 2026

Proximities: Contemporary Art from the United Arab Emirates was the second exhibition in a multi-year collaboration between Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation and Seoul Museum of Art. At its close, I travelled to Seoul and found myself reflecting on the questions it raised about art’s transformative potential.

In Arabic, the root of the word for heart (qalb) comes from qalaba: to turn, to reverse, or to change. Through that frame of reference, the organ becomes more than a vessel that circulates blood; it becomes a site of transformation with its very etymology implying fluctuation and constant motion.
This metaphor offers an entry point into Proximities: Contemporary Art from the United Arab Emirates, an institutional exhibition presented by Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation (ADMAF) of more than 100 works by 47 UAE-based artists at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA).
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The exhibition, which ran from December 16, 2025, to March 29, 2026, opened with A Place for Turning, a section conceived with Farah Al Qasimi as guest artist-curator. Her stylised photographs, depicting domestic life in the UAE in the 1990s and early 2000s, were installed in the first gallery with their colour and detail covering the walls, highlighting the texture of their intimacy. Elsewhere, works extended this encounter with the interior: Maitha Abdalla’s absurd photographs were set within a soft pink tiled space that evoked the inside of a body. The tiles recalled a bathroom’s interior, but the enveloping colour and low light shifted the association toward something more visceral, more psychological.

Curated by Maya El Khalil and Eunju Kim, the exhibition began with the self – with “I.” From where else can we start to make sense of the world? It was also a decision to approach complexity, which can only be processed from somewhere familiar or something that feels like home. From there, transformation becomes possible, not as resolution, but as a way of moving through a fractured world.

I visited during Proximities’ closing weekend, when I was invited by ADMAF to moderate a conversation between El Khalil and Kim, marking the launch of its publication. In my opening remarks, I returned to the word proximity, which usually suggests closeness but, in this framing, asked us to consider something else: not physical nearness, but whether the overlapping of people, ideas, and cultures might produce new forms of meaning.

This enquiry formed the backdrop to conversations both on and off stage. Despite being geographically distant from the escalating conflict in the Gulf, audiences in Korea were hardly insulated from the ongoing fallout of the US-instigated war on Iran. As the global tectonic plates of security continued to shift, a question emerged: when distance and time collapse through technology and the world appears to shrink, what happens to our understanding of it?

I initially set out to write this piece as a meditation on resilience, a kind of ‘the show must go on’ narrative, in which despite missiles, drones and closed airspaces, we converged in South Korea and carried on regardless. But that quickly felt hollow, even cliched. What emerged instead was a reflection on transformation – one embedded in that initial etymology and carried through the exhibition’s three sections and its accompanying publication. Rather than resolving complexity, the exhibition presented it, through multiple voices, allowing for contradiction, and creating space for processing.

To call on Maya El Khalil’s words from her curatorial essay, proximity can only exist in relation. Drawing on the French propre, derived from the same root, she reminds us that it also means “one’s own.” “Proximity, then, is a kind of familiarity: it is what is near to us and what we recognise as such, what we claim as adjacent to our experience, our vision, our understanding,” she writes.

As the exhibition progressed, viewers moved from that familiarity held in the domestic space towards a destabilisation of what we presume to be fixed. In Recording Distance, Not Topography, co-curated by Cristiana de Marchi and Mohammed Kazem, navigational tools such as maps and coordinates became loose and fluid.

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Here we see Kazem’s Directions (Merging), in which GPS coordinates scored into the sand on a beach in Sharjah are being gradually erased by waves. Hazem Harb’s Fragmentation #1, a photographic collage constructed from a pre-1947 map of Palestine unfolds in a concertina pattern of layered repetitions. Borders and markings are stretched and staggered; unclear and uncertain. Set against the backdrop of Gaza’s ongoing decimation, the work felt pressingly urgent to me as I toured the exhibition in March 2026. As a viewer, I was suddenly and abruptly pulled into the present and asked: what does proximity mean in relation to conflict? Do we have the capacity to process the images of war circulate instantly and endlessly in a time-compressed lived existence? And I was brought again to El Khalil’s essay that states that whilst brought closer by technology, we must also be aware that that same closeness risks flattening what it represents. Distance collapses, but so too does depth.

what does proximity mean in relation to conflict? Do we have the capacity to process the images of war circulate instantly and endlessly in a time-compressed lived existence?

Eunju Kim picks up that thought in her curatorial essay, which states “geographic separation makes it difficult for changes in the region to enter the realm of everyday experience.” Through both curators then, we are reminded that proximity, just as truth, is a perspective that is never neutral. It is at once connective and distorting, intimate and estranging. It asks not simply how we come closer to the world, but how we remain open to being changed by what we encounter.

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Nujoom Alghanem’s Passage is the final work in the second section. It is a work that underscores the duality of perspective by presenting a real and a fictional narrative on either side of a single screen that bisects the space, making it impossible to view both sides at once.

After this work, the tone of the exhibition shifted again moving into its third and final section, brought together by artist-curators Rokni Haerizadeh, Ramin Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian. This section titled That Thing, Amphibian considers a generation of artists practicing over the past five years who operate between institutional frameworks and independent practice, which is what the curators describe as an amphibious condition.

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By highlighting the ability of these artists to inhabit two positions at once, the section embraces the multiplicity of perspectives that proximity can bring. The artist-curators articulate this further through the figure of the inner and outer square – the Chinese symbol 回 – which holds both containment and release. It also resonates with El Khalil’s writing that references Virginia Woolf’s The Waves to explain that the exhibition does not move in a straight line but in overlapping formations describing “people and their ways of knowing the world as a series of concentric circles radiating from multiple centres.” Each work becomes a point within this shifting constellation distinct, yet inseparable from what surrounds it.

To experience the exhibition in this way is to move between positions without fully settling into any one of them. And perhaps that is what feels most resonant now. To live in this moment is to occupy multiple, overlapping realities at once: to be physically distant from conflict and yet constantly exposed to it; to continue working, speaking, gathering, while elsewhere lives are being dismantled. Proximity was never something stable to begin with. It shifts depending on where we stand, what we see, and what we choose to look away from.

The final gesture of the exhibition, and one that stayed with me long after I left the museum halls of SeMA, was Ayman Zedani’s The Desert Keepers. This three channel video, commissioned by ADMAF, is a strikingly poetic narrative told from the point of view of a parasite named Cynomorium, which the artist describes as containing both an archive of the desert’s history and the keys to livable futures. Cynomorium is a real parastic organism that only survives by infiltrating and integrating into different plant hosts. Its very existence depends on other organisms; it survives only through proximity. That is what makes it such a wonderful way to end the exhibition. Here, proximity becomes a condition of survival, and a fitting metaphor for the way we live now: fragmented, stretched across multiple places, yet constantly connected through screens, time zones, and networks.

The desert setting brings this into sharper focus. As El Khalil noted, “in the desert, if you stop, you die.” That brought me back to the heart: if it stops, we die. Perhaps then it is in this constant movement – in the necessity of continuing, adapting, turning – that the possibility of transformation resides. Not as a singular event, but as an ongoing condition, held somewhere within the depths of a perpetually turning heart.

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Anna Seaman is a Dubai-based Arts Editor and Consultant who served on the editorial team of Layered Dialogues and moderated the joint publications’ public programme at its launch.