ABU DHABI – The Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation (SHF) announced the return of the Community and Critique: Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship (SEAF) 2019/2020 Show at Warehouse421 on November 14.
The exhibition showcases the works of 16 UAE-based artists after a year-long program in partnership with Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).
The show showcases works that mediate the public and private realms, embracing a site-specificity and urbanity framed in our current world. SEAF fellows draw from diverse backgrounds in visual art, design, sculpture, performance, and literature. Their ages and careers vary widely, with some fellow within only a year of their graduation while others balance active work lives with their demanding studio practice.
Khulood Al Atiyat, Arts, Culture and Heritage Senior Program Manager at Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation said:“7 years ago, when the SEAF program was inaugurated, it was in response to some of the needs that emerging UAE-based artists expressed. Today, we are excited by the strides that the country’s arts ecosystem has taken and to continuously see our alumni play an integral role in this progress.”
She also commented on the changing circumstances caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, saying: ‘Since the new rules around quarantine and the travel restrictions, we have introduced additional remote learning sessions and workshops in addition to studio sessions in the final few months of the program. Challenges will always be part of one’s practice and we have to develop abilities to respond to them, perhaps even use them as sources of inspiration for our own work. Learning comes in many forms, and we have taken this opportunity to look at different ways of working to ensure a quality learning environment to support our exhibiting batch of Fellows while welcoming in the next wave.
SEAF has always been a blended learning experience, based on block teaching weeks and including an online component that allows fellows to work on prompts available through a private online platform. This platform has become indispensable in the current moment, with participants making the most of an at-home experience that provided them with every resource, exposure, and educational opportunity they would have had on their two-week study trip abroad.
Fellowship alumni conducted workshops with resources delivered directly to fellow’s doorsteps. Zoom sessions with SEAF partners from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) faculty also ensued, augmenting online studio visits with artists and museum curators. Fellows thrived in this environment, the circumstances boosting their creativity as they spent large parts of the program working solely from home before the gradual, limited reopening of SEAF’s facilities.
This outcome is consistent with SEAF’S mission to bolster each Fellow’s academic and professional understanding along with their ability to analyze, evaluate and discuss their work in preparation for post-graduate studies and a life-long professional career in the arts.
The participating SEAF Fellows include:
Abdullah Alneyadi (UAE): His practice encompasses sculpture, ceramics, writing, architecture, short film, and photography. Regardless of his chosen medium, he works to create art that is accessible and people-oriented, with a sociological bent that drives him to investigate our collective human behavior with an objective and inquisitive lens.
He will be presenting Urban Presence.
Aisha Al Ahmadi (UAE): As an artist, writer, and aspiring curator, her output is heavily research-based, using her work as a vehicle to interpret her environment through drawing, printmaking, painting, and sculpture.
She will be presenting Signs: Vehicles to Truth.
Arwa Najem (UAE): Najem’s works have previously addressed perceptions of absence and other, more culturally prescient, including colonialism in the Near East. Her current practice draws from the region’s aesthetic and material, and historico-political identity.
She will be presenting It reeks of your peripheral adolescence and fails to consolidate you, and Babel.
Athoub Al Busaily (Kuwait): With previous works elucidating the connection between diary-keeping and the artist’s external environment, Al Busaily’s current practice seeks to explore hypothetical space and place.
She will be presenting Waltzing through borders my dear, The hunter and the hunter, A duck decoy, To become a lover in a single floating system, and Plot analysis, Map of non-land.
Faissal El-Malak (Palestine): As an artist and designer, El-Malak work has contemporary Arab identity and diaspora at its core, irrespective of genre or medium. He continues to explore the body in his work through movement and healing.
He will be presenting Scene for a croissant.
Fatma Al Ali (UAE): Al Ali is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores themes of materiality and form, all while addressing social restriction and personal, invisible burden.
She will be presenting My mother told me not to collect bricks.
Hissa AlZarooni (UAE): A visual artist from Dubai, Hissa has worked with Art Dubai, Dubai Design Days, Brand Dubai, Venice Biennale, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi. She is currently developing her practice through the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship.
She will be presenting Your secrets belong at home.
Maitha Hamdan (UAE): While Hamdan has worked across both performance and visual art, fabric and textiles have proven a common denominator as mediums of narration that help her address religion and social confinement in her practice.
She will be presenting Till we are back to heaven.
Malak Alghuel (Libya): Alghuel employs time as both a demarcator of change and an intangible, documentable medium to examine the social and political changes in the MENA region and specifically her home country, Libya.
She will be presenting If I Could Count You and If I Could Trace You… If I Could Hear You.
Mohammad Alshaibani (UAE): Artist Alshaibani draws inspiration and influence from Frank Miller, David Mazzucchelli, and other greats of the Silver Age of American comics. He works with traditional comic artist’s fare, anything that yields a steady ink line. His work employs bold inking and geometric representation to immerse readers.
He will be presenting The 4th Chamber, Cafeteria, Sign Me Up, Honorable Scribe, Inspection and the short films Soldier and …Know The Mechanicals.
Mouza Al Hamrani (UAE): An illustrator and multimedia designer, her practice draws on experiences throughout her Khaleeji upbringing, touching on cultural inheritance, existentialism, superstition, and the human condition. Often playful, humorous, and stylized, they incorporate both kinetic and graphic elements.
She will be presenting theperformer.gif.
Nabla Yahya (India): With a practice based in her architectural education, she has since drawn on the metaphysical to fuel her work. She is interested in celluloid, earth, and ethereal.
She will be presenting A Visitation
Sara Ahli (UAE): Ahli’s work explores discomfort while maintaining a sense of both humor and play. Her performances push the body to exhaustion, testing her physical limits in whatever space she occupies.
She will be presenting A performance, just for your eyes, An embodied experience, and A forced gesture with intent.
Sarah Almehairi (UAE): Almehairi’s work addresses language, form, and memory through narrative and abstraction. She engages with form and structure to distill a visual language while exploring the push and pull of material. Through this process, her works tell half-stories, both disclosing and obfuscating.
She will be presenting To Replicate is Not to Repeat, Non-Replica: A New Permanence, and A Filled Form is Familiar.
Sari Al Taher (Palestine/Philippines): Al Taher’s practice invokes both the anthropocene and the pleasures of dreams and imagination to create spatial, sensory experiences. He marries his visual sensibilities with generative algorithms and code to manufacture unique, personal moments of reflection.
He will be presenting Terra Incgonitae
Zainab Abdelaziz (Sudan): Eldin uses art to help make sense of her identity as a Sudanese woman while bringing to light the many challenges and hardships inherent to Sudanese society. Her materials, significant to Sudanese culture, are manipulated and transformed to create works that contribute to the dialogue around these issues.
She will be presenting Colored black.
Artists talk program:
November 16: Artist Talks: Community & Critique Panel with SEAF Cohort 7 Fellows- Sarah Almehairi, Sari Al Taher and Faissal El-Malak, Moderated by Nadine Khalil and Nasser Alzayani
To kick-off the Community & Critique SEAF Cohort 7 show, the selected artists will share their work produced throughout their 10-month fellowship, culminating in their final body of work. Their discussion will touch on their overall fellowship experience, along with their experimentations and the evolution of their practices under and within this close-knit community.
November 30: Artist Talks: SEAF Cohort 7 Fellows- Sara Ahli, Fatma Al-Ali and Zainab Imad Eldin, Moderated by Sarah Almehairi and Nasser Alzayani
Title: Process & Repetition
The conversation will explore how exhaustive experimentation developed as a method of generating a body of work. The artists’ use of repetition materializes both formally and conceptually in their final works.
December 14: Artist Talks: SEAF Cohort 7 Fellows- Athoub Albusaily, Malak Elghuel and Nabla Yahya, Moderated by Sarah Almehairi and Nasser Alzayani
Title: The Poetics of Performance
This final talk will showcase unexhibited supplemental elements to the artists’ final artwork alongside poetry readings, recorded process footage, and performances.
The exhibition will open its doors on November 14 until December 20, at the Warehouse 421.
