Abu Dhabi’s 421 Arts Campus announces its fall 2026 exhibitions featuring a major new solo exhibition by Juma Alhaj and group exhibition Archipelago of Whispers

4 October – 10 January 2027

 

• Revelation, the first institutional solo exhibition by Emirati artist Juma Alhaj marks a significant and ambitious evolution in his practice. It is the culmination of his participation in 421 Arts Campus' Artistic Development Program (ADP) and explores the themes of reflection, solitude, and inward contemplation.
• Archipelago of Whispers is curated by Deniz Kirkali and Elham Puriya Mehr and brings together works by regional and international artists including Aliaskar Abarkas, Ruba Al-Sweel, Farah Al Qasimi, Gizem Karakaş, Yen Chun Lin, Omar Mismar, and Ayman Zedani. It explores alternative infrastructures for knowledge-making such as whispers, murmurs, hums, gossip, and storytelling.
• Together, the exhibitions reflect 421 Arts Campus' commitment to artistic experimentation, research-led practice, and critical dialogue.

 

Revelation by Juma Alhaj, 2026. Courtesy of 421 Arts Campus, Photography by Ismail Noor, Seeing Things.

 

Abu Dhabi, UAE — 421 Arts Campus, the independent arts platform dedicated to supporting emerging artists and creative practitioners from the UAE and the wider Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region, presents two major exhibitions this fall, on view from 4 October – 10 January 2027.

Revelation is the first institutional solo exhibition by Emirati artist Juma Alhaj. Grounded in reading, journaling, and philosophical inquiry, the exhibition explores the themes of reflection and self-discovery. Developed through 421's Artistic Development Program (ADP), it marks a significant and ambitious evolution in Alhaj's practice, expanding his distinctive visual language beyond painting into installation for the first time.

Archipelago of Whispers, a group exhibition curated by Deniz Kirkali and Elham Puriya Mehr, brings together works by artists from the UAE, the wider SWANA region, and beyond, including Aliaskar Abarkas, Ruba Al-Sweel, Farah Al Qasimi, Gizem Karakaş, Yen Chun Lin, Omar Mismar, and Ayman Zedani. Through video, sound installations, and performance, the exhibition explores alternative infrastructures for knowledge-making such as whispers, murmurs, hums, gossip, and storytelling.

Revelation

Visitors experience the exhibition barefoot, moving across a carpeted environment that shifts through changes in material, light, and enclosure. Throughout the exhibition, Alhaj’s abstract inscriptions, encompassing both writing and image, extend across glass, fabric, light, and architecture, shifting with the environment and the movement of visitors through the exhibition.

The exhibition begins with Balaa (2026), a mixed-media diptych developed through Alhaj's recurring tally mark system. The repeated marks accumulate across the two panels, reflecting on experiences, repetition, and the passage of time.

Traces (2026) is a series of engraved glass elements that extends Alhaj’s inscriptions into transparent surfaces. Light and shadow complete the work, allowing the engraved marks to appear as shifting reflections rather than fixed images.

Hijr (2026) is composed of suspended fabric panels surrounding a quiet water feature. Gestural inscriptions appear across the fabric, while light, shadow, movement, and sound encourage contemplation. A carpeted floor recalls the sensation of walking across sand, slowing the body and inviting stillness. Hijr offers a secluded environment for pause and reflection, where the shift in light, material, and sound encourages a quieter, more sustained attention.

Juma Alhaj says: “Revelation is not about arriving at an answer. It is about what becomes visible when we give ourselves enough time to pause, look inward, and recognize where we are on a much longer journey. Through movement, repetition, light, and silence, I see this exhibition as a checkpoint, a moment to acknowledge what has brought us here before continuing towards whatever comes next.”

Developed through the 2025 cycle of 421's Artistic Development Program (ADP), Revelation is the culmination of an extended period of research, experimentation, and artistic development. Facilitated by Jolaine Frizzell, the ADP supports emerging artists in the UAE to expand their practice, experiment with new approaches, and develop ambitious new bodies of work towards their first institutional solo exhibition.

Archipelago of Whispers 

Archipelago of Whispers explores alternative infrastructures for knowledge-making such as whispers, murmurs, hums, gossip, and storytelling. It examines how speech and silence, the felt and the known, the self and the other, can overlap and shape our understanding. Considering less hierarchical forms of knowledge production and exchange, the artists approach communication from distinct perspectives, from whispered confessions to an endangered whale song, language games, dreams, and participatory performance.

Farah Al Qasimi's video titled Everybody was Invited to a Party (2018) takes inspiration from the 1980s Arabic version of Sesame Street (Iftah Ya Simsim), using puppets voiced by the artist to present language and letters as malleable objects without fixed meaning. In the video, the artist seeks moments where a failure to communicate creates new opportunities for meaning. Ayman Zedani's Between Desert Seas (2021), a multilayered sonic installation, immerses visitors in the songs of the critically endangered Arabian Sea humpback whale – a unique nonmigratory population of their kind that has been isolated for about seventy thousand years. In their solitude, they developed their own language, song, and culture. Omar Mismar presents two works, Root and Branch (2026) and Suspending belief, Suspending disbelief (2017/2026), examining the fragile space between hearing and saying. In an installation taking the form of a hammock, Mismar presents a physical metaphor for the circulation of speech, exploring how we might inhabit and enjoy rumors, how judgment is suspended, and how easily belief itself becomes a matter of balance.

Gizem Karakaş's Guilty Pleasures IV (2018) unfolds as a dispersed field of whispered voices that move across the exhibition space. Through intimate fragments of speech, the work explores relations, emotions, and aspirations, exposing the small conflicts and vulnerabilities often concealed in everyday life. Ruba Al-Sweel's AI-narrated video-essay titled FIRST PHONE (2024) explores our relationship with technology and crisis, examining how we experience global issues such as climate change, platform capitalism, and geopolitical unrest through the screens of our digital devices. For Aliaskar Abarkas’ site-responsive performance Between the Shelves (2026), passages gathered from the gallery library during a two-day workshop are reassembled into a vocal score that circulates through the audience, allowing language to shift through repetition, proximity, and mishearing. Yen Chun Lin's sound installation Amorphous Vessels: Undertide (2026) and live performance Amorphous Vessels: Ground Current (2026) explore non-verbal interspecies communication and the concept of dream-listening. 

Together, the exhibitions reflect 421's commitment to supporting artistic experimentation, long-term development, and research-led practice.

Faisal Al Hassan, Director of 421 Arts Campus, says: “At 421, we see exhibitions not simply as an endpoint, but as part of a longer process of artistic research, experimentation, and development. Our exhibition program is shaped by sustained engagement with artists and curators, creating the conditions for practices to develop through research, dialogue, material exploration, and the process of exhibition-making itself. This means supporting artists as they test new approaches, work across different forms and scales, and consider how their work is encountered in the gallery.”