Bringing together works that orbit around the sun as image, index, and metaphor, curator Murtaza Vali offers a compelling lens on ten years of experimentation at 421. SUN™ becomes an elemental archive through which the region’s artistic and ecological stories come into focus.
‘Rays, Ripples, Residue’, 2025. Installation view. Image courtesy of 421 Arts Campus, Abu Dhabi. Photography by Ismail Noor, Seeing Things.
When curator and writer Murtaza Vali was invited to contribute to ‘Rays, Ripples, Residue’, the anniversary exhibition marking ten years of 421 Arts Campus, he did not embark on a long conceptual search. Instead, the idea arrived in a rush of clarity. Confronted with Shazia Salam’s Emotional State (2022), a work that playfully and poignantly channels the sunny optimism of Modesh, Dubai’s summertime mascot, Vali found himself flooded with recollections.
“I could almost immediately see the exhibition in my head,” he recalls. Memories surfaced of other works across the UAE that turn their gaze toward the sun from Raja’a Khalid’s High Noon (2016) to Pratchaya Phinthong’s We are lived by powers we pretend to understand (2024). These works did not simply reference light. They revealed how the sun itself has become a symbolic, political, ecological, and emotional presence within the UAE’s cultural landscape.
‘Rays, Ripples, Residue’, 2025. Installation view of Raja’a Khalid, High Noon, 2016. Automotive paint, steel, MDF, rubber, 2 of 5 panels. Image courtesy of 421 Arts Campus, Abu Dhabi. Photography by Ismail Noor, Seeing Things.
This intuitive spark would become SUN™, Vali’s contribution to the three-part exhibition. His section uses the sun as both metaphor and method, allowing an elemental force to anchor its artworks conceptually and spatially. “The works are held together by the sun, an eternal and universal presence in our lives,” he explains. Yet the sun in Vali’s curation is not merely a source of radiance. It is a complex protagonist.
“I wanted to complicate our associations of the sun with happiness, life, and sustenance,” he says. It’s heat in the Gulf, once a familiar constant, is now “a palpable index of a worsening climate crisis.” In this way, SUN™ becomes an exhibition about comfort and crisis, illumination and opacity, nostalgia and unease.
Light as Commodity
The “™” in the title is a deliberate provocation. For Vali, it gestures toward the ways natural symbols are absorbed into systems of branding and power. “Examining the sun as an image and a commodity, as a simulacra of itself, co-opted by capital, seemed to be a way to address both its familiarity and its strangeness,” he notes. Modesh, a recurring figure in the show, encapsulates this duality. He is cheerful and iconic, yet also a branded avatar of spectacle and desire.
Lantian Xie, SUNSHINE, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Grey Noise.
This inquiry opens a conversation about how everyday symbols evolve within political and economic contexts. The sun, omnipresent and universal, becomes a critical site for examining climate anxiety, resource extraction, cultural memory, and the visual languages of the Gulf.
A Spatialised Colour Field
Visually, SUN™ is structured around gradients of red, yellow, orange, and pink that echo the transitional thresholds of sunrise and sunset. Fellow curator Nadine El-Khoury described it as “a spatialised colour field painting,” a phrase Vali embraces for its ability to capture the exhibition’s atmospherics. The colour palette connects works that differ vastly in material and tone, while also embodying the transitional spirit of the anniversary itself.
One of the exhibition’s central commissions features a new work by the Filipino collective Sa Tahanan, honouring Romy Miclat, the original designer of Modesh. Placing this homage within the broader constellation of artworks traces how icons migrate across time, cultures, and communities, collecting meaning along the way.
‘Rays, Ripples, Residue’, 2025. Installation view of Sa Tahanan Co., Liham Mula Sa Araw (Letters from the Sun), 2025. Mixed media installation, printed postcards, text. Image courtesy of 421 Arts Campus, Abu Dhabi. Photography by Ismail Noor
Gravitational Curating
Across the entire ‘Rays, Ripples, Residue’ exhibition, Vali sees recurring threads linking the three curatorial voices. Some were unplanned. “Munira’s and Nadine’s exhibitions share an artist, the late Tarek Al-Ghoussein, and reference the artist-run space Bait 15,” he notes. His own section includes a work he first encountered in a separate exhibition curated by Nadine. These overlaps reveal the “intimate and intertwined” nature of the UAE art scene.
In SUN™, this interconnected logic takes on an astronomical metaphor. “The sun functions curatorially as it does astronomically,” Vali says. “Its gravitational pull holds a variety of artworks in its orbit.” Radiance becomes a method. Warmth becomes connective tissue. And heat becomes an archive, leaving behind residues of past conversations and contexts that can still be felt today.
Nima Nabavi, Source Code, 2025. Archival Ink on canvas, 76 cm diameter, 79 cm diameter (framed). Courtesy of the artist and The Third Line, Dubai.
As 421 steps into its next decade, SUN™ offers a reminder that light is never neutral. It shapes bodies, memories, landscapes, and futures. It illuminates and burns, comforts and cautions, sustains and exposes. In Vali’s hands, the sun becomes a map of ten years of artistic production in the UAE, and a guide toward the uncertainties and possibilities still unfolding.
‘Rays, Ripples, Residue’ is on view at 421 Arts Campus until 24 April 2026. For more information, visit 421.online.
