Speculative Links
On view at Art Dubai 2022
This exhibition presents select works from the Salama Bint Hamdan Emerging Artist Fellowship’s (SEAF) eight-year tenure, pulling threads and recurring themes of research that persist through different cohorts. From painting, textile, video, and photography, the selection reflects a collective questioning of memory to place, time, and a sense of rhythm and repetition.
Titled "Speculative Links," the exhibition brings together artists who retrospectively seem to have experimented during the fellowship with abstract patternology, participatory narration, geo-mapping, digital dislocation and fabrication through the lens of research. The show attempts to reflect on the relationship between art pedagogy and production, and the connection forged between the artists' authentic voice and the processes and critiques that shape their practice.
The exhibition gives a sense of how artists from different cohorts responded to the program, producing works that resonated achronically with each other, and mapping a collective sense of vulnerable and precarious placement. The artists' work spans a wide range of practices, including painting, drawing, engraving, mixed media, and embroidery, exploring from personal memories, to social commentaries, as well highlighting the intense homing desire.
The exhibition is Curated by Maryam Al Dabbagh and Mays Albaik, and includes works by Asma Khoory, Tala Worrell, Dina Nazmi Khorchid, Sawsan Al Bahar, Shaikha Al Ketbi, Fatima Al Budoor, Mohamed Khalid and Malak Elghuel.
Warehouse421 is a creative center located in Mina Zayed, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, and is dedicated to emerging creative practitioners and those who want to access art and harness it as an agent for inquiry, education, and growth. Warehouse421 sees the creative process as a lens for observation, questioning, critique, and interpreting life. It is a practice of risk-taking, sharing, thinking, reflecting, dialogue, and understanding. Putting education at the forefront of culture, it champions the acquisition of knowledge and aims to support the next generation of deep thinkers, researchers, and practitioners who are engaged with the country and the region.
The Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship (SEAF) is an intensive 10-month artistic education and development program for promising UAE-based artists supported by the Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation. Established in 2013, SEAF focuses on the artistic development process, the critique process, immersive studio practice and the cultivation of an interactive online community for participating artists and faculty.
This exhibition is commissioned by Warehouse421 in collaboration with The Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artist Fellowship (SEAF) and Art Dubai.
