Spring 2022 programme

Art Jameel announces a roster of solo exhibitions, learning initiatives and film programmes for spring 2022 at Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai’s contemporary art museum.

Highlights include major solo exhibitions by Taus Makhacheva and Fahd Burki, the inaugural edition of Park Projects featuring Trevor Yeung and Nahla Tabbaa and an all-new, two-day ecology symposium “Shifting Earth,” sparked by the Artist’s Garden (Desert is a Forest).

Exhibitions

Taus Makhacheva: A Space of Celebration
February 23–August 14, 2022 
In her first survey in West Asia, Taus Makhacheva brings her expansive body of installation, sound and performance works to recount complex histories through a cast of characters, including her alter ego, Super Taus. Her humorous installations involve dysfunctional exercise rooms, Soviet-era circuses, wedding halls and suspended mountain ranges.

Fahd Burki: Daydreams
March 5–October 9, 2022
Fahd Burki’s first international solo features more than 50 works spanning the past 15 years of the Lahore-based artist’s considered practice. Burki’s paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures stem from his interest in architecture, nature, sci-fi and pop culture. On view are earlier figurative works and a new series of abstract reliefs. 

The exhibition is accompanied by an Art Jameel publication featuring texts by Murtaza Vali, Saira Ansari and Dawn Ross.

Commissions

Park Projects
Nahla Tabbaa, ongoing since October 2021
Trevor Yeung, until May 2022

The inaugural Park Projects series invites artists to respond to Jaddaf Waterfront Sculpture Park. The works inhabit the public space, questioning notions of community, nature and the very concept of commissions.

Since October 2021, artist Nahla Tabbaa has been using the exterior spaces of the Jameel as sites of experimentation. Looking at organic ecosystems and their imbrication in networks of food production, Shamsa is a series of time-based interventions using textile and organic material to observe the passage of time through the impact of the sun. Tabbaa’s commission will result in a limited-edition artist’s book, designed with Layan Attari, launching in March 2022.

Hong Kong-based artist Trevor Yeung’s site-specific work occupies the Jameel’s parking lot. Rock Universe (2022) is a series of rocks adorned with light fixtures, solar panels and artificial plants that emit light, keeping night-time park visitors company.

Library Circles: Salma Serry
February 2, 2022–August 1, 2022

Jameel Library presents food writer and filmmaker Salma Serry’s research into regional menus as a site of confluence where history, knowledge, politics, economies, senses and semantics are revealed. Serry expands her research methods to include printed menus, informal publications, interviews and personal photo archives to piece together a new regional narrative.

Serry’s research also links Jameel Arts Centre’s programme with that of its new sister institution, Hayy Jameel in Jeddah, which launched in December 2021. Hayy Arts’ opening exhibition, Staple: What’s on your plate?, co-curated with Delfina Foundation, investigates what we eat and the entanglement of food with memory, ecology and place.

Public programme

“Shifting Earth Symposium”
March 26–27, 2022
“Shifting Earth Symposium” invites botanists, artists, anthropologists and historians to reflect on the web of relations, influences and current work happening at the intersection of community-based cultural practices and environmentalism. Taking UAE ecology and the Jameel’s Artist’s Garden (current edition titled Desert is a Forest) as a starting point, this two-day symposium considers human and non-human relations in native ecosystems and how these entanglements could inform our understanding of the global biodiversity crisis through a botanical lens. Full programme and guest speakers to be announced soon.

Jameel Arts Centre’s Gallery 9 film screenings running through the spring respond to current exhibitions Off Centre / On Stage curated by Todd Reisz and Pacita Abad: I Thought the Streets Were Paved with Gold, plus “Shifting Earth Symposium” and Staple: What’s on your plate? in Hayy Jameel, Jeddah. Films include Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me, Paradise) by Stephanie Comilang, Mes Voisins (My Neighbours) by Med Hondo and Mur Murs (Mural Murals) by Agnes Varda among many.