Ala Younis: Past of a Temporal Universe

This exhibition spans the last two decades of Ala Younis’ hybrid practice as an artist-researcher-curator. The projects on view range from the ambitious landmark installations that brought her voice to the global stage, to new trajectories in her practice. Together they offer a kaleidoscopic survey of how Younis traces subtle and startling connections among political, social, urban, and popular imaginaries.

Informed by her training in architecture and visual cultures, Younis’ projects center on the physical developments and narrative intersections of the Arab geographies in which she grew up. She frequently develops projects from a wide range of formal and informal archives as they intermingle with the textures of intimate, individual lives behind the scenes of world history. They range from industrial militarism to modern architecture, to the making of an Arab imaginary through publishing and TV programming. One of her new projects is dedicated to her physical experience of Abu Dhabi as an urban and domestic landscape.

One aspect of the artist’s work cannot be fully shown in the exhibition format: her significant contribution as a curator, and as a publisher, both on the global stage, even as those practices are also embedded in her artistic practice.

Particularly in the context of a university, a mid-career retrospective of this kind draws out the subtle ways that disciplines and fields of study are, in fact, interdependent, though they might appear unrelated. Some interdisciplinary dialogues are more explicit (such as engineering and nation-building). Others are more implicit (as when performance art, childhood worlds, and political upheaval intertwine and echo one another). 

Curator Maya Allison collaborated with Younis to organize the exhibition by themes that repeat and evolve in her work, with the following headings: Keys, Seeding Power, Making Arabs, Designing Power, Climate Conditions, Promising Sovereignty, and Trading Fragility. 

Curated by Maya Allison (NYUAD Chief Curator, Executive Director of the Art Gallerys at NYUAD). 
Lenders and supporters of the exhibition include: Art Jameel, Barjeel Art Foundation Sharjah, Sharjah Art Foundation, NYUAD’s Arts & Humanities Research Forums, and al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art.

About Ala Younis

Ala Younis’ work has appeared in exhibitions worldwide. She has participated in the biennials of Dhaka, Istanbul, Venice, Gwangju, Ural, Orléans, Ljubljana, Kaunas, Sharjah, and the Islamic Arts in Jeddah, as well as the New Museum Triennial: The Ungovernables (2012, New York). She curated Kuwait’s first pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2013), served as co-Head of Berlinale’s Forum Expanded (2021-2024), was co-Artistic Director of Singapore Biennale 2022, Artistic Director of the Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne (2023-2025), and a recent research scholar at al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, at New York University Abu Dhabi. She co-founded the independent publishing initiative, Kayfa ta, which researches and publishes on and through independent endeavors. Younis holds a BSc. in Architecture from the University of Jordan (1997), MRes in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London (2016), and is currently reading for a doctorate at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford.

Younis is represented in several major institutional collections, including: Le Frac Centre-Val de Loire (France); Darat al Funun (Jordan); the Uppsala Art Museum (Sweden); Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah Art Foundation, and Jameel Art Collection (all UAE); and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (US).

Press contact: Maisoon Mubarak | maisoon.mubarak@nyu.edu