BEYOND EMERGING ARTISTS 2022 IN ABU DHABI & LONDON

Artists: Majd Alloush | Khalid | Sarah Almehairi

About Beyond Emerging Artists 2022:

Sarah Almehairi, Majd Alloush and Khalid are distinct voices in the UAE’s cultural landscape today; their thoughts and preoccupations resonate widely among the 200 different nationalities that have made the UAE their home.
Khalid interrogates the idea of movement and adaptation through intervening in the life of a jellyfish residing in the artificial landscape of Palm Jumeirah, Dubai. The artist relocate it to a less developed beach, an odyssey to reclaim a lost paradise. The experiences of the jellyfish and the artist become interchangeable.
Majd Alloush, a Syrian exiled from his ancestral land, disrupts notions of geographical boundaries through his work, reimagining a possible future for his country of origin and questioning the borders and frontiers of a fraught past. The simplicity of a line becomes its vulnerability and abstracted aerial images chart a possible course through.
Sarah Almehairi upturns the notion of an original in her work, using found packaging materials that point to the immensity of trade, commerce and production in the UAE. Working with these packing materials, re-forming them from one medium to another in a continual process of reinvention, the notion of an original gradually disappears.

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?