BEYOND EMERGING ARTISTS 2023

Curator: Morad Montazami

Artists: Almaha Jaralla | Latifa Saeed | Samo Shalaby

An annual initiative that provides three emerging artists in the UAE with a platform from which to develop their practice and realise ambitious art projects. The selected artists undertake a year-long programme created by a guest curator each year with critical feedback and support from the curator. The programmme leads toward the realisation of a group exhibition for the Abu Dhabi Art Fair in November. The works remain on exhibition to the public for several months in Abu Dhabi beyond the fair dates and are then exhibited internationally.

Supported by Friends of Abu Dhabi Art since 2021.

The three appointed artists for Beyond Emerging Artists 2023, Almaha Jaralla, Latifa Saeed and Samo Shalaby, all based in the UAE, have each been shaped differently, through the roots that ground them and the multicultural routes that have brought them to where they now stand. Beyond their clear differences as individual artists, all three navigate an interesting path between historical issues and contemporary matters, private and public space, subjective and collective memory. They also embody a compelling and cosmopolitan vision of the Gulf region, in which cosmogonic phenomenon and ecological concerns exceed national borders.

Although each artist presents new work that is unique and distinct, all three explore a new dialectics of daylight and nocturnal spaces. In a world where global warming brings us to reconsider our normal schedules and to invent new extensions of our lives, their installations propose a kind of third space, beyond day and night, seeking for a speculative realism.    

- Morad Montazami, director of Zamân Books & Curating, currently resident of the Villa Medicis in Rome (Italy) and curator for Beyond Emerging Artists, Abu Dhabi Art 2023

Almaha Jaralla

Abu Dhabi-based Emirati visual artist (b. 1996), Almaha Jaralla’s installation Crude Memory presents a fictional reenactment of the emblematic Al-Ruwais location near Abu Dhabi and its ghostly traces in the present. The 1970s-1980s architecture and housing bear a particular memory and experience of petro-modernity and cultures – which developed between vernacular and postmodern forms. The intimate and domestic space comes across with the epic narrative of the oil industry and its economic quest. Investigating on the ruins of such forgotten heritage, she particularly looks into the remnants of plants and gardens, through radiant landscapes and lost futures.

Latifa Saeed

Dubai-based Emirati visual artist (b. 1985), Latifa Saeed’s installation Dust Devils offers a never seen before technological experience based on a fundamental cosmogonic narrative and poetics of science. Referring to the mysteries of nature, rooted in a cultural language that has evolved from the UAE’s distinct desert landscape, it organizes in three different devices: smoke machine, hologram and electro-magnetic. Each translates an atmospheric phenomenon that can be experienced in the desert, through various whirlpools and tornados, when air, water, fire and earth come together. A reminder of the fragility and resilience of the traditional landscape in the critical age of Anthropocene.

Samo Shalaby

Dubai-based Egyptian-Palestinian visual artist (b. 1999), Samo Shalaby’s installation’s What Lies Beneath unveils a theatrical and extravagant labyrinth of surreal visions – inspired by various art historical movements from the Renaissance and Baroque art to the Pre-Raphaelites and Symbolism, in a contemporary reappropriation. His extremely refined and serendipitous paintings, photographs and jewels project the viewer into a beginningless and endless visual carnival – behind which lies a meditation on our multiple identities. His strategic and dramatic use of the curtains and the almost metaphysical pattern of the fold function stimulate our imagination toward a dreamscape of his making.