Rays, Ripples, Residue

This major exhibition marks the ten-year anniversary of 421 Arts Campus and offers a chance to reflect on emergent artistic practices in the UAE, their possibilities, and challenges for the future. Featuring video, performance, installation, and multimedia works, it invites conversations around what it means to produce art in the UAE today from the vantage point of emerging artists, collectives, and grassroots initiatives, to the influential role of cultural institutions that have supported and platformed these practices.

It’s realised through three curatorial perspectives, all with time as a central theme:

Munira Al Sayegh’s Leading to the Middle draws on the nature of expansion found within a ripple effect, tracing the influence of key actors whose contributions have created lasting reverberations. Featured artists include Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim, Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Bait15, Adele Bea Cipste, Khaled Esguerra, Lamya Gargash, and Auguste Nomeiakaite.

In Ghosts of Arrival, Nadine Khalil meditates on the layered experience of arriving after a time of artistic ferment, risk-taking, and a now-mythologized energy that shaped cultural production in the UAE from the early 2000s to the mid-2010s. Rather than restaging or romanticizing the past, Khalil proposes that the memory of risk itself becomes a material, informing art-making and exhibition-building in the present. Featured artists include Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Mona Ayyash and Nadine Ghandour, Lucinda Childs, Maria Daher, Sarah Daher, Cristalina Parra, Bait Juma, Hashel Lamki, Sara Naim, and Isaac Sullivan.

Murtaza Vali’s SUN gathers artworks created and exhibited since 2015 that revolve around the idea and experience of the sun. Her section presents a nuanced view of the sun as a mediated and commodified presence – at once image, data, brand, vibe, and produc, revealing the contradictions embedded in narratives of modernity and progress. Featured artists include Charbel-joseph H. Boutros, Khalid Jauffer, Raja’a Khalid, Nima Nabavi, Pratchaya Phinthong, Sa Tahanan Co. (Jandri Angelo Aguilor, Farah Fawzi Ali, Preschelle Ann Bigueras, Anna Bernice delos Reyes, Alexandra Chaves, Niño Consorte, John Gatapia, Balaram Ochangco, Augustine Paredes, Nicolas Roa), Shazia Salam, and Lantian Xie.

While all distinct in approach, each section has a shared focus on the minor pivots rather than major inflection points. A look at overlooked gestures that accumulated over time, Rays, Ripples, Residue illustrates the impact of subtle shifts that have shaped the past decade of art-making and exhibition building. It also sets the tone for the next decade of 421 and the UAE’s growing arts ecosystem, asking what ideas will still carry forward into the next decade?

To 26 April.