PROXIMITIES

The Seoul Museum of Art and Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation presents PROXIMITIES, spotlighting contemporary art from the United Arab Emirates.

PROXIMITIES features more than forty UAE-based artists, including 33 Emiratis, across three generations—a Gulf nation shaped by the convergences of migration, natural abundance, and rapid urban transformation since its foundation half a century ago. Through three sections, collaboratively developed with artist-curators, the exhibition explores what happens when unstable and subjective worlds—personal, social, urban—come into contact. Scaling from the domestic and imaginary to the geopolitical and the elemental, the artists and curators ask how we can exist in nearness without collapsing into sameness. 

In today’s interconnected world, we are configured into proximities that exceed what geography can map. In the immediacy and closeness offered by globalisation, artists work with inherited forms and circulating materials. Between the regionally specific and the internationally legible, this tripartite exhibition considers how ideas evolve through movement and translation—colliding and synthesising views. The three sections propose distinct ways of encountering and seeing: the artist-curators were invited to respond to themes that resonate with their practice; collaborating with curators Maya El Khalil and Eunju Kim, they gathered peers together to develop positions that articulate ways of encountering the world. Additional works gravitate around each section, creating routes between the artists’ perspectives. These connecting sections become productive intervals where different approaches to cultural navigation emerge.

Anchored with a section proposed by photographer Farah Al Qasimi, A Place for Turning is where the familiar and the strange merge. Domestic life unfolds behind walls, creating concurrent realities we cannot see. Imagination sustains interior realms, nurturing new modes and affinities that might meet a changing world. Moving outwards into social orders, Recording Distance, Not Topography, conceived by Mohammed Kazem and Cristiana de Marchi, reckons with spatial relations in flux. Though maps, coordinates, borders, and compasses inscribe power, here, they become unstable, breaking free to diagram alternative formations. Sustaining this mutability, That Thing, Amphibian is a return to the elemental and an evolution into hybridity. Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian have organised their collaborations into a structure that comes from the Chinese/Korean character—a square within a square—evoking return, containment, and the interplay of inside and outside. Artists becoming “amphibians of meaning” as they live simultaneously in two environments.

Each area of focus proposes a different mode of encounter—everyday fabulation, mapping flux, and amphibious states of reciprocity. These three propositional positions form a constellation rather than separate categories, their ideas flowing between and connecting approaches.

PROXIMITIES is part of the Abu Dhabi Festival, a landmark collaboration between ADMAF and Seoul Museum of Art. Following Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits—which brought Korean new media artists to Abu Dhabi in summer 2025—this reciprocal exchange explores proximities between two cultural contexts, each navigating negotiations of heritage and futurity, local particularity and global circulation.

Participating artists: Farah Al Qasimi, Mohammed Kazem, Cristiana de Marchi, the Artist trio Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian, Layan Attari, Sara Al Haddad, Moza Al Matrooshi, Rashed Qurwash, Almaha Jaralla, Shaikha Al Ketbi, Aliyah Al Awadhi, Maitha Ali, Maitha Abdallah, Jumairy, Rand Abdul Jabbar, Afra Al Dhaheri, Ebtisam Abdulaziz, Alaa Edris, Ammar Al Attar, Mohamed Al Mazrouei, Raja’a Khalid, Tarek Elkassouf, Hazem Harb, Abdullah Al Saadi, Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, Hussain Sharif, Vikram Divecha, Hassan Sharif, Vivek Vilasini, Shaikha Al Mazrou, Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Ala Younis, Nujoom Alghanem, Ayman Zedani, Kholoud Sarafi, Shamma Al Bastaki, Rawdha Al Ketbi, Shamma Al Amri, Abdul Qader Al Rais, Fatma Al Ali, Najat Makki, Ayesha Hadhir, Maitha Al Omaira, Rayan AL Jneibi, Khalid Seddiq

Curated by: Maya El Khalil (Curator), Eunju Kim (Curator, SeMA) with an assistance by Hee-on Sim and Yebin Woo, Exhibition Coordinator

Organized by: Seoul Museum of Art, Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation. 

Supported by: [Lead Partners] Mubadala, G42 / [Energy Partner] GS Energy / [Cultural Partners] Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (Korea), Korean Cultural Center, KOFICE, Kore·A·Round Culture