“What is a university gallery?” asks Maya Allison, Chief Curator and founder of the NYUAD Art Gallery, in one of the essays in The NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery 2014-2020, a book with a commendably explicit title that explains the gallery’s genesis and progress through its early years. The answer to the rhetorical question is that a university gallery is “driven by pedagogy, not commerce … the university gallery’s goal is the study and experience of all that art and material culture can convey”.

She does amplify this by a rather good analogy, likening the university gallery – at least the one at NYUAD – to a teaching hospital. The faculty of a medical school and the leaders of the gallery are experts in their field, connected to a wider international community of research and knowledge, applying that in the work they do. “Likewise, our art galleries serve the curriculum, faculty research, and the public, simultaneously: to do one is to do all three”.

In practice this places considerable emphasis on the choice of exhibitions, the curating, and any associated research, publications and actual teaching. So what kind of exhibitions would work in the context of a fast-growing contemporary arts scene in the UAE and the emerging cultural landscape of Saadiyat?

The good news is that the last ten years have seen a stream of exhibitions that tick all the boxes – interesting, stimulating, clever, imaginative, worthy of research, memorable. From the visitor’s point of view, there have been absolutely no duds in terms either of content or of presentation – which is unusual, to say the least. Here are ten shows that magpie thinks worthy signposts in the NYUAD Art Gallery’s first ten years.

The Art Gallery really hit its stride early with its third exhibition, a major solo show of work by the noted sculptor Diana Al-Hadid. She transforms Renaissance and classical imagery into contemporary sculptural forms that appear to be decaying or resurfacing, often in an apparently melting cascade of white gypsum.

The theme of memory and its physical manifestations in art and architecture runs throughout Al-Hadid’s work; this exhibition took its title from a central work with the same title, Phantom Limb, which captures the character of much of Al-Hadid’s work through a visceral, materially-focused working technique.

At the time Diana Al-Hadid said: “It’s an absolute privilege to work with Maya and the NYU Abu Dhabi gallery staff. They have a deep respect for artists’ needs and a tremendous depth of appreciation for the work itself …”

There’s an interesting discussion here between Maya Allison and Diana Al-Hadid where the artist discusses her work and practice – well worth catching.

By contrast with the vision of a single artist and a single curator, this show inaugurated one of NYUAD Art Gallery’s unique programming strategies: inviting academics to guest-curate a major exhibition. In this case it was Scott Fitzgerald, a media artist who heads the Interactive Media program at NYUAD, who co-curated an exhibition of works by 15 international artists with Bana Kattan, then assis­tant curator at the NYUAD Art Gallery. As Fitzgerald put it: “The ways we treat and use technology are central to my practice and teaching. This show is an exciting opportunity for me to work through these ideas in a new context …”

The exhibition itself considered the “invisible threads” that bind us to the technologies that have become all-pervasive, inviting us to contemplate the nuanced relationship between man and machine and especially the dichotomy between aspiration (technology makes the world better!) and anxiety (how does it do that? What else is happening? Who controls the technology, and what else might they do with it?).

Kattan and Fitzgerald assembled works by 15 international artists that investigate “the invisible networks and structures we do not understand and cannot see but upon which contemporary communication technologies, and life as we know it, now relies”. All the exhibits posed questions, from Michael Joaquin Grey’s lifesize replica of Sputnik – an historical object, but also a potent metaphor – to Monira Al Qadiri’s iridescent replicas of oil drilling bits, en route to becoming exhibits in museums of the future. Ai Wei Wei’s digitally printed wallpaper (above) looks fabulous but is made up of Twitter icons, surveillance cameras and handcuffs. There was more reference to surveillance in Taysir Batniji’s apparently pixelated (but actually pencil-drawn) profile portraits of five blindfolded men. And the highlight of the show for us was Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s 3D renderings of faces created from DNA extracted from items collected in public places – strands of hair, chewing gum, cigarette butts. The biological materials that make us unique are no longer our own …

Artists: Ai Weiwei (above), Jamie Allen, Aram Bartholl, Taysir Batniji, Wafaa Bilal, Liu Bolin, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Michael Joaquin Grey, Monira Al Qadiri, Evan Roth, Phillip Stearns, Siebren Versteeg, Addie Wagenknecht, Kenny Wong

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of this key exhibition, key to establishing the role (as well as the reputation) of the NYUAD Art Gallery. Many contemporary artists from the Emirates have achieved success and some even fame, with galleries and collectors beyond the region recognising their value. Several have shown together, or have been part of larger group exhibitions (notably at the Sharjah Biennials and the UAE’s Venice pavilions). But rarely have they been gathered together with this kind of spotlight; there had never before been such a comprehensive, articulate exposition of what turned out to be a burgeoning community, showing how individuals were linked (or what they got from each other) and how they relate to a wider art ecosystem (or where they looked inward for their practice). “The trajectory from a small community of unknown experimental practitioners to a group of well-established figures in the UAE arts scene happened in only a few decades … Their path, as well as what they have produced, also serves as an inspiration for emerging artists in the UAE, a kind of root structure for the cultural development of the Emirates.”

The basis of the show (curated by Maya Allison) was solid research, notably in depth interviews with the artists. And as with all the Art Gallery exhibitions, this show was accompanied by a substantial monograph that reproduced those interviews with accompanying essays. This has become a seminal sourcebook for the art of the region.

Artists: Abdullah Al Saadi, Ebtisam Abdulaziz, Hassan Sharif, Hussein Sharif, Jos Clevers, Mohammed Kazem, Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim (above), Vivek Vilasini

Yet another approach to programming came with an invitation to the highly rated curatorial team of Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath. They had already shown a couple of versions of this show elsewhere, but it was reconfigured with a number of new artists and artworks for Abu Dhabi.

The exhibition references John Berger’s seminal 1972 text on visual culture, Ways of Seeing, in which he consciously shifted the language and practice of art criticism away from the conventional European concept of the art expert. Bardaouil and Fellrath invited the viewer to actively engage with the artwork: “there is no one ‘correct’ way to look at art, and our wish is that our audiences should both be aware of and embrace their individual reactions and points of view, as these are borne of unique personal experiences.”

In total there were 41 artworks, a satisfyingly eclectic mix in a variety of media – painting and sculpture, but also photography, sound, film, and installation – from 26 artists and collectives. They included Mona Hatoum, Lateefa bint Maktoum, Hassan Sharif, Cindy Sherman, Grayson Perry, James Turrell, and Thomans Struth. Eclectic, right?

Artists: Ghada Amer (above), Frédéric Borgella, James Casebere, David Claerbout, Salvador Dalí, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Andreas Gursky, Mona Hatoum, Paul and Marlene Kos, Alicja Kwade, Lateefa bint Maktoum, Gustav Metzger, Shana Moulton, Vik Muniz, Grayson Perry, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Fred Sandback, Markus Schinwald, Hassan Sharif, Cindy Sherman, Jojakim Cortis and Adrian Sonderegger, John Speed, Thomas Struth, Kim Tschang-Yeul, James Turrell, James Webb

Maya Allison curated this exhibition of installations by four UAE-based artists – Areej Kaoud, Ayman Zedani (above), Jumairy, Raja’a Khalid – that explore ‘environment’ generally and ‘landscape’ in particular. Allison listed the physical landscape but also social media and the landscape of our well-being: “each installation offers an imaginary journey derived from the artists’ real-world observations of
everyday life”, as the press release put it.

“For me, these artists capture something unique in their perspectives, both in how they respond to our surroundings, and how they connect to the unusual art scene here,” said Allison, who sees a connection between the speedy rise of contemporary art in the UAE and the increasingly
cosmopolitan nature of the country.

Put like that, Speculative Landscapes felt like a natural follow-on to But We Cannot See Them. That show presented existing artworks, bringing them together in what was essentially a record of a historical moment; for this show the artists made new work, never seen before – and that approach represents a very different kind of curatorial challenge.

The pandemic necessarily persuaded many of us to remodel the way we live, work and socialise. One of the obvious changes is the increased focus on online communication – Covid-safe, free from geographical or horological constraints. In the art ecosystem this resulted in a rash of online viewing rooms and digital-only auctions; the NYUAD Art Gallery came up with a genuinely novel response, a digital-only exhibition that’s viewed on your phone rather than in a physical gallery. It was a purpose-built website navigated via a branching pathway, “a decentralised network diagram”, that is actually represented as a line. “I love the idea that we are operating the exhibition when we visit it, instead of being led through it by its architecture” Maya Allison told us at the time.

Co-curated by Maya Allison and Heather Dewey-Hagborg (see above), nine artists and art collectives figured in stops along the way where they could riff on our relationship with technology for “self-expression and self-fashioning”

Artists: Addie Wagenknecht, Cao Fei, Eva and Franco Mattes, Lee Blalock (above), Maryam Al Hamra, micha cárdenas, Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian, Sophia Al-Maria, Zach Blas

Another contrasting approach to exhibitions, this show featured over a hundred works from the collection donated to NYU by the eponymous Ms Grey, a millionaire widow who spent her later years travelling in the Middle East and India, meeting and befriending artists, and amassing one of the most impressive collections of modern art from Iran, Turkey and India. “These regions each had their own engagement with key issues of ‘modernity’,” notes Maya Allison, “and as art historians have begun to establish, there have been many ‘modernisms’”.

Abby Weed Grey particularly embraced the Saqqakhaneh school – Parviz Tanavoli, Faramarz Pilaram, Charles-Hossein Zenderoudi, and their peers who sought to reinterpret Iran’s rich traditions of calligraphy, architecture, ornamentation and Shiite iconography in contemporary idioms. She also acquired many works by members of the influential Progressive Artists Group, which broke away from the traditional Indian nationalist art movement to form an avant-garde collective that looked outward to other cultures – Francis Newton Souza, Maqbool Fida Husain, Prabhakar Barwe and more. And visiting Turkey in the 1960s resulted in a lifelong fascination with Turkish modernism; ultimately she purchased nearly 110 works from Istanbul’s modernist visionaries, artists such as Abindin Eldergolu, Fahrelnissa Zeid and Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu.

This was another landmark survey of modern art in the region, curated by Aisha Stoby and based on her PhD research tracing the region’s ‘pre-boom era’ of the twentieth century (through to 2008, which for some marked the ‘post-boom’) and examining the evolution of visual art movements as the discovery of oil began to transform the region.

Dr Stoby had clearly curated the show as something of a corrective, both to give some exposure to an internationally neglected region and to challenge a traditional, probably European, understanding of what ‘modernism’ is and how it interpreted. It featured 60 works by 38 artists from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the UAE, and they had been loaned by 24 different institutions, galleries, private collections and other sources – an impressive bit of curatorial detective work in its own right.

Artists: Abdul Karim Al Bosta, Abdul Karim Al-Orrayed, Abdul Qader Al Rais, Abdulhalim Radwi, Abdullah Al Qassar, Abdullah Al Saadi, Abdullah Al Shaikh, Abdulrahman Alsoliman, Ahmed Qassim Al Sunni, Ali Mohamed Al Mahmeed, Anwar Sonya, Budoor Al Riyami, Ebtisam Abdulaziz, Hassan Meer, Hassan Sharif, Hussain Qassim Al Sunni, Ibrahim Ismail, Issa Saqer Al Khalaf, Khalid Albudoor, Khalifa Qattan, Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, Mohammed Ahmed Rasim, Mohammed Al Saleem, Mohammed Kazem, Mojib Al Dosari, Moosa Omar, Mounirah Mosly, Munira Al Kazi (above), Najat Makki, Nasser Al-Yousif, Nujoom Alghanem, Rashid Abdul Rahman Al Balushi, Rashid Al Oraifi, Safeya Binzagr, Sami Mohammed, Thuraya Al-Baqsami, Yousef Ahmad, Yousef Khalil

For COP28 and the Year of Sustainability, the Art Gallery went back to a conventional format, a major show of 3D work by a single artist, but managed to tweak the mix by inviting the artist to collaborate with a member of the NYUAD faculty. Blane De St Croix, who has developed a practice that involves extended periods of field research to document and question the relationship between humans and the contemporary landscape, was commssioned to produce four major new works; they resulted from an extended residency, the artist having spent some months in Abu Dhabi.

The results are characteristically realised as large collages or immersive sculptural installations. The major project was Salt Lake Excerpt (above), developed with theatre director and NYUAD Theater Professor Joanna Settle. It’s a huge sculptural installation inspired by the sabkhas and shallow estuaries of the UAE; the sculpture is made of PET flakes, the product of recycling around 50,000 plastic water bottles, which undulate gently with light and sound.

This year’s Spring show was yet another approach to the Art Gallery’s remit. Most art exhibitions are by their nature static; you go an look at work that has already been created. The active element is the visitor and their reaction to the work.

But with In Real Time, some of the art didn’t exist at all when the show opened. Some of the artists joined during the run. Some of the art was performative, featuring music and dance. Some of the works were amended and accreted during the run, in a couple of cases with the audience’s involvement.

Maya Allison had been thinking about street-art murals for this show, with in situ creation. But “I realised that what I really liked about the idea was not so much the murals themselves, but the idea that the artist was in the space and that we got to be a part of the birth of the artwork. So even if we see it after it’s finished, you can feel that the artist was only recently there …”

In the event, most of the eight artists originally invited did install something prior to the opening; but some artists kept adding all the way through the run, and others were invited to take part actually during the run. Says Allison: “I think it was resoundingly positive that some people were willing to take a leap of faith on the project.”

Artists: Nujoom Alghanem, Moza Almatrooshi, Rana Begum, Chafa Ghaddar, Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian, with Julie Becton Gillum and Kiori Kawai, Gözde İlkin (above), Sol LeWitt, Cristiana de Marchi, Haleh Redjaian

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