Fall 2023 program: Earthly Joys

421 Arts Campus presents its fall 2023 program: Earthly Joys. From September 24 to December 21, the season features two major exhibitions and over twenty workshops, talks, and special events exploring the profound connection between humanity and nature. Opening on October 22 are Nine Nodes of Non-Being, a group exhibition curated by Ritika Biswas that is part of the Curatorial Development Program, and Asma Belhamar: Solid Void, a solo exhibition resulting from the 2023 edition of the 421 Artistic Development Program. 

Running in tandem with these exhibitions, the fall 2023 program promises diverse workshops, talks, and special events that empower and educate through collaborations with UAE-based artists, creatives, artisans, researchers, academics, and initiatives. The program features interactive environmentally-conscious workshops, guided nature walks, insightful talks and discussions with environmental experts, craft-based experiments that explore local materials, a film festival focused on climate-related works, home-cooking sessions, and other special events designed to preserve and celebrate our planet. 

Curated, designed, and organized by participants in the 421 Internship and Mentorship Program, Ahmad Al Bissani, Salmah Almansoori, Sarrah Bashir, Keertana Cherukuri, Dana Husseino, and Zeina Saleh, the fall 2023 program coincides with COP28, presenting a youth-led approach that fosters a deep connection with the environment. Earthly Joys is conceived as an invitation to connect, learn, and contribute to a brighter, more equitable future. 

Asma Belhamar: Solid Void
Part of the Artistic Development Program
On view from October 22 to December 31, 2023
Gallery 1

Asma Belhamar’s new solo exhibition, Solid Void, captures the tensions between shifting natural geographies and dynamic urban environments, featuring new works inspired by the UAE's architectural history. The exhibition is footnoted by the artist’s reflections on culture and national identity in flux. 

Solid Void narrates the topographic evolution of the UAE, as influenced by Western classical modernity, contemporary traditionalism in Islam, and the historic trade relationships that shaped much of that landscape. The artist's deft interpretation reveals the diversity and fragmentation of the design sensibilities that have made the nation’s aesthetic identity what it is today. 

Solid Void is the result of the 2023 edition of the Artistic Development Program, which is organized in collaboration with The Institute for Emerging Art. 

Nine Nodes of Non-Being
Curated by Ritika Biswas 
On view from October 22 to December 31, 2023
Gallery 2

Nine Nodes of Non-Being is a group exhibition presenting works by nine artists, thinkers, filmmakers, and researchers from East, South, Southeast Asia, the MENA region, and South America. It conceives of climate-related extinction through various states of negation and excess emerging from each of the nine artistic nodes to examine ways of existing more equitably within our ongoing crises. 

Nine Nodes of Non-Being is not an attempt to represent the Anthropocene but rather conceives of non-being, and thus negation itself, as a creative and generative expanse. The artistic worlds presented here are not merely signifiers of extinction but real propositions for the unknown. The forms of excess and negation found within the work of the participating artists hold the simultaneity of muchness and blankness; the paradox of extinction itself; that we are both in the immense thick of it (muchness) and yet cannot conceive of it (a blankness). Through these excessive modes, we think about ways of non-being and the climate apocalypse itself in ways we have likely never considered—through kitsch, rest, cringe, bathos, abstraction, silliness, melancholy, madness, and the weird. 

The artists taking part in this exhibition are Mariam AlZayani, Fayçal Baghriche, Clemencia Echeverri, UNMAKE LAB, Malik Irtiza Zara Mahmood, Amba Sayal-Bennett, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Ayman Zedani. Their projects span diverse media, including drawings,  moving image, sculpture, photo transfer, text, soundscapes, and multimedia installations. 

Nine Nodes of Non-Being is curated by Ritika Biswas and emerged from a year-long journey as part of the 421 Curatorial Development Exhibition Program in collaboration with The Bombay Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR).