Rays, Ripples, Residue explores the lasting impressions, afterimages, and the material residues that have shaped exhibition-making and artistic production in the UAE over the past decade. Since 2015, the local art scene has evolved into a dynamic ecosystem, marked by the rise of artist-led initiatives, expanded institutional support, and growing international visibility through biennales, art fairs, and cultural diplomacy. This period has also witnessed deeper engagement with regional histories, identity, and decolonial narratives, reflected across both institutional and independent platforms. Framed through three curatorial perspectives, the exhibition engages with time as a central theme: Munira Al Sayegh curates a chapter that explores past reverberations while Nadine Khalil considers post-moment hauntings. Murtaza Vali presents enduring critiques of commodification and elemental presence. 

The exhibition marks the ten-year anniversary of 421 Arts Campus, offering a space for reflecting on emergent artistic practices in the UAE, their possibilities and challenges for the future. Featuring video, performance, installation, and multimedia works, the exhibition invites conversations around what it means to produce art in the UAE today from the vantage point of emerging artists, collectives, and grassroots initiatives, to the influential role of cultural institutions that have supported and platformed these practices.

Munira Al Sayegh’s Leading to the Middle draws on the nature of expansion found within a ripple effect, pegging that movement onto the UAE’s arts landscape over the past decade. Through this lens, she traces the generosity and influence of key actors whose contributions have created lasting reverberations, marking formative turning points in the development of the scene and illuminating what preceded them. Featured artists and spaces include Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim, Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Bait15, Adele Bea Cipste, Khaled Esguerra, Lamya Gargash, and Auguste Nomeiakaite.

In Ghosts of Arrival, Nadine Khalil meditates on the layered experience of arriving "after": after a time of artistic ferment, risk-taking, and a now-mythologized energy that shaped cultural production in the UAE from the early 2000s to the mid-2010s. As a writer and researcher who entered the scene after this formative period, she examines the quieter structures that continue to shape the present. Rather than restaging or romanticizing the past, Khalil proposes that the memory of risk itself becomes a material, informing art-making and exhibition-building in the present. Featured artists and collectives include Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Mona Ayyash and Nadine Ghandour, Lucinda Childs, Maria Daher, Sarah Daher, and Cristalina Parra, Bait Juma, Hashel Lamki, Sara Naim, and Isaac Sullivan.

Murtaza Vali’s SUN™, gathers artworks created and exhibited since 2015 that revolve around the idea and experience of the sun. As the source of all life, the sun has traditionally been associated with ideas of life and happiness, its light and movement establishing the changing seasons and the rhythms of daily life. The works in SUN™, however, present a more nuanced take, reflecting on how, like much of nature in the region, the sun is understood and represented as a mediated and commodified presence: at once image, data, brand, vibe, and product. Reflecting the growing complexity and maturity of artistic practice and discourse in the UAE, the diverse conceptual, material, and process-based approaches on display are pitched between the sun’s eternal beauty and increasingly urgent critiques of consumption and climate change, revealing the contradictions embedded in narratives of modernity and progress. Featured artists include Charbel-joseph H. Boutros; Khalid Jauffer; Raja'a Khalid; Nima Nabavi; Pratchaya Phinthong; Sa Tahanan Co. (Preschelle Ann Bigueras, Alexandra Chaves, Niño Consorte, Bernice delos Reyes, John Gatapia, Bala Ochangco, Augustine Paredes, Nicolas Roa, Mox Santos); Shazia Salam; and Lantian Xie.

While all distinct in approach, each section holds a shared harmony through the connecting thread that weaves through all of them: a focus on the minor pivots, minor moments, rather than major inflection points. A look at overlooked gestures that accumulated over time, Rays, Ripples, Residue illustrates the impact of subtle shifts that have shaped the past decade of art-making and exhibition building. Most importantly, it sets the tone for the next decade of 421 and the UAE’s growing arts ecosystem, asking: what ideas will still carry forward into the next decade?

For school visits, please note that tours can be arranged on request. Kindly email hello@421.online for further assistance.