Six fine arts graduates from NYUAD are showing work at the Rizq Art Initiative in Abu Dhabi in an exhibition titled Mutable Devotions, which runs until August 31. The show splits into six smaller exhibitions, one for each artist, and keeps circling the same hard subjects: memory, belonging, displacement and colonial history. The materials are ceramics, AI, charcoal and preserved human skin. The setting is polished. The subject matter is not.
Memory Under Glass
Nour Elbery’s installation, Set Dressing for an Afterimage, starts with empty aquariums that still rev and babble. Motors keep circulating water through black steel frames, while the glass panes carry a salty residue from the receding waterline and, perhaps, from what once lived inside. Two round vertical containers stand nearby, filled with murky liquid and tall enough to hold a person. They’re empty except for something on the floor that looks like moss or seaweed, though the strands and tufts aren’t green. Elbery says, “Inside the jars are shavings of my skin,” and adds, “There’s a formalin inside, a preservation solution.”
She says the skin shavings aren’t meant as a shock element, “not completely anyway,” and writes in her artist statement, “Each work is less a vessel for something than a vessel for the memory of holding something.” That line does a lot of work. So do the empty tanks.
Elbery says the piece was inspired by the Aquarium Grotto Garden in Zamalek, Cairo, which she says was initially built in 1871 as “a bit of a vanity project for Khedive Ismail,” whom she describes as “the Ottoman viceroy, infamous for his extravagance.” She says he wanted a private space for his collection of aquatic plants, and that the cave system was created to simulate the sounds of the sea. Elbery says, “It was built by a ruler who dreamed of possessing the Nile, of controlling this Egyptian land that was owned by Ottoman suzerainty from below and European credit markets above,” and adds, “It was a loaded time, just before the British occupation.”
Following the British occupation in 1882, she says, the grotto was retrofitted with glass displays, housing fish and creatures from the surrounding environment. She says the site became a more menacing enclosure for life on the Nile. Now it’s empty of live fish, with barren tanks or, at most, skeletons, though it remains a public favourite, especially for young couples who draw hearts and initials on the aquariums’ glass panes. “It’s beautiful,” Elbery says.
Survey, Partition, Control
Shaima Shamsi’s Notes on Being Swallowed by a Cavity also returns to the old habit of measuring, sorting and enclosing the world. One work in her presentation uses 170 ceramic tiles arranged in a grid on the wall. Each tile is uniquely coloured and creased, building a field of earthen hues and textures. Shamsi says, “For me, it was an aspect of thinking about the memory of the land.” She adds, “Most of my practice looks at displacement and belonging, but through this work, it was looking at it through the lens of the land and ways of looking at land.”
She says the grid is often used to partition and survey land, “to make it breakable and understandable section by section,” and that it becomes a very unnatural imposition, “cut into the memory of the land.” Shamsi says she combed through geological surveys the British conducted around the Gulf in the early 20th century to identify land ripe with resources. She references a 1908 publication by British geologist Guy Ellcock Pilgrim. She says, “This volume in particular looks at surveys carried out in the Arabian Peninsula,” and adds, “When Pilgrim writes about Bahrain, he has this constant analysis of the land and what’s there. He has a very short paragraph about the burial mounds behind him – just four lines. And he says they are potentially Phoenician or Egyptian. It is very superficial.”
The mounds date back to between 2200 and 1750BCE and were built by the ancient Dilmud civilisation. Today they’re listed as Unesco World Heritage sites. Shamsi says their absence from those early-20th century archives may have helped protect them. “Absence is constantly a double-edged sword,” she says. “It can mean the emptiness of things, but it is also the wealth of knowledge at the same time.” She extends that idea through photographs of the mounds and a large fishnet-type installation made from uneven tiles and suspended from the ceiling, essentially an upended form of the burial mounds. “The shape and form of this then thinks about how the mounds are cavities within the earth, and how they’ve existed for 4,000 years – an intelligence of civilisations prior to us,” she says.
The Human Test, the Fake Choice
Yuehan Dai’s work turns to the digital world and its little rituals of suspicion. She creates what she calls verification systems, drawing from her background in computer science. The installation includes Captcha challenges and AI agents that observe human behaviour. The centrepiece is a classroom with desks, a blackboard and a computer screen that prompts visitors to choose a word that proves they are not AI. Dai says the work is almost like an obstacle course to determine the humanity of the visitor, and that it’s the inverse of a Turing test, with a machine deciding what constitutes a human.
Almaha Jaralla’s multidisciplinary installation, Agraba, scrambles the past and present in a fictional realm. It features billboard-size paintings that collage Orientalist compositions with contemporary advertisements in a way that makes it hard to tell one from the other. A table of spinning coins stretches through the centre of the space, and the coins are the currency of the fictional Agraba. A larger transparent version gyrates beside it. Jaralla writes, “It gives the illusion of choice, yet both sides are identical and transparent, revealed as a structure that produces nothing.” She writes, “Between the smaller coins and the larger counterpart, there is a never-ending cycle.” She also writes, “Each explains the other’s motion. To stand between them is to stand inside that loop. Stainless steel runs through both sculptures. It is the surface of the contemporary Gulf, found in malls, towers and airport interiors. A material that appears permanent and neutral while remaining entirely manufactured.”
Tooba Shahbaz Shaikh’s Holding Or uses charcoal drawings, animation and text to explore the effects of a city on the human body and psyche. Shaikh says she was thinking about migrants who move to a new place in search of economic stability. “I was thinking about what happens to certain bodies when they move from one place to another,” she says. “You have to adapt quickly.” Her drawings show plant-like forms growing synthetic materials, including stems and branches that incorporate steel and plastics, as well as shapes reminiscent of cranes and street cones. A multi-channel video projected on the walls, floor and corners of a dark space, alongside a crunching soundscape, tells the story in movement using the same aesthetic as the charcoal drawings.
Shaikh says, “The story starts with a seed who is stuck on the foot of a worker who is travelling from another country to here, and he’s on a construction site,” and adds, “The seed also arrives and the environment is different from what it is used to, and so it starts transforming.” The worker moves. The city absorbs. The seed adapts. That’s the whole machine, stripped down to its parts.