Part of the Abu Dhabi Festival Abroad programme, the show is the second chapter of a unique institutional collaboration bringing two major co-curated and co-produced groupexhibitions to the cities of Abu Dhabi and Seoul in 2025.
Proximities
16 December 2025 – 29 March2026 Seoul Museum of Art, South Korea
Opening 16 December 2025 – 29 March 2026, Proximities is a significant new group exhibition that brings together the work of artists long embedded in the dynamic and ever-transforming cultural landscape of the United Arab Emirates. On view at Seoul Museum ofArt, the show brings together more than 80 works by 47 artists spanning threegenerations, including Hassan Sharif, Abdullah Al Saadi,Shaikha Al Mazrou, Ala Younis, Rand Abduljabbar and Jumairy. This milestone exhibition is the most comprehensive presentation of contemporary art from the UAE ever held in Korea.
Spanning photography, video, painting, sculpture, performance and installation, theexhibition traces how meaning transforms across generations and geographies, revealingsubtle shifts shaped by exchange and cultural context. Presented by Abu Dhabi Music &Arts Foundation (ADMAF) and Seoul Museum of Art as part of Abu Dhabi Festival, the exhibition examines how different forms of proximity – emotional, geographic, shared cultures and narratives – inform transformations without erasing difference. The exhibitionis being held under the honorary founding patronage of His Highness Sheikh Abdullah binZayed Al Nahyan, UAE Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs and FoundingHonorary Patron of Abu Dhabi Festival.
Co-curated by Maya El Khalil and Eunju Kim, the exhibition unfolds through three propositions, each theme developed in partnership with artist collaborators, including FarahAl Qasimi, Mohammed Kazem and Cristiana de Marchi, and the artist trio RaminHaerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian (RRH). Each section offers a distinct way of encountering the world, with focal points merging and contrasting world views. The artists’ curatorial interventions create worlds into which peers and audiences are invited for reflection, dialogue and discovery.
In the first section, Farah Al Qasimi’s uncanny photographs appear amid other imagined and surreal domestic spaces, channeling a speculative picture of the Emirates from the1990s to today. In the second, Mohammed Kazem and Cristiana de Marchi’s meditations on experiences of physical and psychological disorientation are presented alongside large-scale installations exploring memory, displacement, and belonging. Finally, in the thirdsection, the RRH trio organise their intervention around 回– a square within a square – juxtaposing artefacts of nation-building, art objects from daily environments and elemental matter. In doing so, they dismantle familiar structures of imagination to reveal other possibilities. These three perspectives are articulated through works by established and emerging artists such as Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, Ebtisam Abdulaziz, Ayman Zedani, Nujoom Al Ghanem, Layan Attari, and Vikram Divecha, alongside many more.
The three generations of artists in the exhibition – born in the UAE and elsewhere, growing up amid and contributing to the country’s dynamic transformations – navigate betweenthe individual and the collective, the local and the global. They mediate the push and pull of the contemporary and the traditional, layering regional contexts with history and emergent futures.
Displaced into Seoul’s landscape, the works gain new resonance, showing how positions alter and understanding deepens when the familiar encounters the new. As meanings mutate through movement and translation, encounters reshape individual and collectiveworld views. The exhibition’s accompanying publication ‘Layered Dialogues: Proximities’ willfeature texts written by Seoul-based writers prompted by the themes, deepening thedialogue between the two art scenes and framing the exhibition in the cultural context of Seoul.
The public programme accompanying the exhibition includes a series of panel discussions and artist film screenings. Further details of the public programme will be available online in due course.
