A landmark exhibition at the Seoul Museum of Art explores nearness, movement, and cultural negotiation through the work of more than forty UAE-based artists.
Dialogue. © Farah al-Qasimi
Opening at the Seoul Museum of Art, ‘PROXIMITIES’ presents a wide-ranging survey of contemporary art from the United Arab Emirates, bringing together more than forty artists across three generations, including thirty-three Emirati practitioners. Spanning practices shaped by migration, urban expansion, and ecological conditions, the exhibition considers how proximity functions as both a lived condition and a conceptual framework in an increasingly interconnected world. Presented by Seoul Museum of Art in collaboration with the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation, ‘PROXIMITIES’ unfolds as a sustained inquiry into how artists navigate nearness without collapsing difference, and how meaning emerges through contact, translation, and circulation.
Rather than approaching geography as a fixed framework, the exhibition positions proximity as a dynamic state. It reflects on how individuals, materials, and ideas encounter one another across domestic, social, and geopolitical scales. Through three interconnected sections developed collaboratively with artist-curators, PROXIMITIES proposes proximity as an active process shaped by imagination, negotiation, and hybridity.
Contemporary Art from the UAE Across Generations
The exhibition reflects the complexity of the United Arab Emirates as a relatively young nation formed through intersecting histories of trade, migration, and rapid urbanisation. Artists included in ‘PROXIMITIES’ work across painting, photography, installation, sound, video, and conceptual practice, engaging with inherited forms alongside globally circulating materials. Together, they articulate artistic positions that move between regionally specific experiences and internationally legible vocabularies.
By foregrounding collaboration between artists and curators, the exhibition resists a singular narrative of national identity. Instead, it presents a constellation of practices that address how subjectivity, place, and cultural memory are continually reconfigured through proximity.
Three Curatorial Positions on Nearness and Encounter
The first section, A Place for Turning, is proposed by photographer Farah Al Qasimi. It focuses on domestic and interior spaces as sites where imagination and lived experience intersect. Behind walls and within private environments, multiple realities coexist, often unseen. This section explores how interior worlds foster new affinities and modes of being that quietly respond to broader social change.
Moving outward, Recording Distance, Not Topography, conceived by Mohammed Kazem and Cristiana de Marchi, examines spatial relations under conditions of flux. Maps, borders, coordinates, and measurement systems are treated not as stable markers of power but as mutable tools that can be reimagined. Artists in this section interrogate how space is sensed, recorded, and redefined when conventional cartographies fail to capture lived complexity.
The final section, That Thing, Amphibian, organised by Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian, returns to the elemental. Drawing on the structure of a Chinese and Korean character composed of a square within a square, the section evokes containment, return, and the relationship between inside and outside. Here, artists are described as amphibians of meaning, existing across multiple environments at once. Hybridity becomes a mode of survival and creativity, allowing practices to operate simultaneously within different cultural and conceptual systems.
Proximity as a Cultural Method
While each section proposes a distinct mode of encounter, the exhibition is structured so that ideas flow between them. Works gravitate across sections, forming productive intervals where different approaches to cultural navigation intersect. This constellation-like structure reflects the exhibition’s central premise: proximity is not about sameness, but about sustaining difference within shared space.
In this way, ‘PROXIMITIES’ reframes globalisation not as flattening, but as a condition that intensifies negotiation. Artists work within inherited traditions while responding to circulating forms, producing practices shaped by both continuity and disruption.
A Transnational Institutional Exchange
‘PROXIMITIES’ is presented as part of the Abu Dhabi Festival and marks a significant moment of cultural exchange between the United Arab Emirates and South Korea. Following ‘Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits’, which introduced Korean new media artists to Abu Dhabi earlier in 2025, this exhibition reverses the direction of exchange. It offers Seoul audiences insight into how artists in the UAE navigate questions of heritage, futurity, and global circulation.
Organised by Seoul Museum of Art and the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation, and curated by Maya El Khalil and Eunju Kim with the assistance of Hee-on Sim and Yebin Woo, the exhibition reflects a shared institutional commitment to dialogue across cultural contexts. Supported by partners including Mubadala, G42, GS Energy, and multiple cultural institutions in Korea, ‘PROXIMITIES’ positions contemporary art as a space for sustained international conversation.
‘PROXIMITIES: Contemporary Art from the United Arab Emirates’ is on view at Seoul Museum of Art, South Korea, from 16 December 2025 to 29 March 2026. For more information, visit sema.seoul.go.kr.
