BEYOND EMERGING ARTISTS 2022

Beyond Emerging Artists is an annual initiative supporting three emerging UAE-based artists in developing their practice and creating ambitious new works. Each year, a guest curator selects and mentors the artists through a year-long programme of workshops and studio visits. This culminates in the presentation of their commissioned projects at Abu Dhabi Art in November, with the works remaining on public display for several months after the fair. The programme is supported by Friends of Abu Dhabi Art and sponsored by Abu Dhabi Art’s global partner, HSBC. 

Artists: Majd Alloush | Khalid | Sarah Almehairi

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Location 1: Manarat Al Saadiyat – Gallery M

Dates: 16 | 11 | 2022 – 22 | 1 | 2023

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Location 2: Cromwell Place, London – Gallery 10 & 11

Dates: 7 | 6 | 2023 – 11 | 6 | 2023

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Premise:

In a landscape shaped by flux, transnational histories, and constant reinvention, Majd Alloush, Khalid, and Sarah Almehairi present three distinct yet interconnected artistic practices. As artists rooted in the UAE—home to over 200 nationalities—they engage with personal and collective themes of displacement, adaptation, and transformation. Their works become propositions for how to navigate the complexities of contemporary existence, shaped by memory, migration, material culture, and ecological change.

Majd Alloush, a Syrian exiled from his ancestral land, challenges the permanence of borders and the violence of separation. His work reimagines geographies through abstraction—where a simple line reveals its fragility, and aerial views of fractured landscapes become paths toward speculative futures. Through his practice, the past is not fixed, but open to redefinition, allowing for a reconnection with places that remain out of reach.

Khalid engages with the concept of movement - both physical and metaphorical - by tracing the journey of a jellyfish relocated from the engineered seascape of Palm Jumeirah to a quieter, less developed shoreline. This gesture of environmental and emotional intervention blurs the line between human and non-human experience. As the jellyfish adapts, so too does the artist, revealing how survival and belonging are constantly negotiated within altered ecologies.

Sarah Almehairi turns her focus to the invisible architectures of trade, consumption, and production that shape the UAE. Working with found packaging materials, she transforms these utilitarian remnants into drawings, sculptures, and layered compositions. In this iterative process, the notion of an "original" becomes irrelevant - subsumed by cycles of reuse and reinterpretation. Her work questions where meaning resides: in the object, the material, or the act of transformation itself.

Together, the artists explore what it means to live, remember, and create in a place that is perpetually shifting. Their practices offer poetic interventions into the systems - geopolitical, ecological, and material - that define our contemporary moment.

Majd Alloush

Majd Alloush is a Syrian artist based in Abu Dhabi, whose creative practice explores geopolitics and social and environmental issues such as the ramifications of war and displacement. This work is situated within a hybrid practice, at the intersection of traditional processes and innovative methodology.
The phrase "digital cartography" is often repurposed and reinvented in order to tell a story. In Alloush’s work, the term is frequently redefined through a variety of aerial images, abstract drawings, and a spherical world represented as a flat surface. Since his last visit to his home country of Syria in 2010, his doubts and uncertainty of returning have only grown higher, and have led him to examine his relationship with the Syrian border. In 36º 50', Alloush contemplates the porous nature of geographical boundaries. The simple yet complex line on a map is what Alloush finds interesting; his main objective is to deconstruct and examine the form of such a line in the context of space and politics, making its character fragile and moveable, yet visible. In 36º 50', Alloush offers a glimpse of hope for a world where borders are open..

Khalid

The artist’s practice is defined by walking, running, cycling and driving as modes of dissecting the everyday. He draws from real-life episodes of missed communication: or more precisely an understanding of the systems that combine to form communication and the gaps or interstices between. In Agua Viva, he takes his encounter with a jellyfish and investigates the creature's circulation to the sea.

When you translate “Agua Viva” from Spanish, it translates to “Living Water” or even “Water Life” but in Portuguese, Agua Viva translates to “Jellyfish”.

Khalid examines the materiality of everyday objects and coaxes out their metaphoric potential.

The artist is an alumnus of the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship and Campus Art Dubai 7.0, with previous group shows at Art Dubai, Warehouse421 and Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Sarah Almehairi

Sarah Almehairi is an artist based in Abu Dhabi. Her body of work investigates themes of materiality, systems and interrelations, memory and language, through the intuitive and poetic examination of narrative and abstraction. By engaging with geometric forms, she extracts and defines a structural language read time and time again to suggest a form other than its own.

For her project for Beyond Emerging Artists, Almehairi has created an installation of floor sculptures, collages and monoprints that all derive from found packaging. Throughout the process, containers are broken down, built, and reassembled as continuous iterations of themselves. As the object moves from one medium to another, one dimension to another, the artist questions; how does it cross thresholds? Does it morph and create its own? Are there boundaries to dimensionality?

Almehairi’s work proposes that there is no such thing as an original, it is always a reinvention of something that came before as shown through the investigative connections she makes. Through the act of repetition, meaning is inherently regenerated, reproducibility has no end. Is there a beginning? How does one position themselves in a landscape of multiples?