About Beyond: Emerging Artists 2022:
Sarah Almehairi, Majd Alloush and Khalid are distinct voices in the UAE’s cultural landscape today; their thoughts and preoccupations resonate widely among the 200 different nationalities that have made the UAE their home.
Khalid interrogates the idea of movement and adaptation through intervening in the life of a jellyfish residing in the artificial landscape of Palm Jumeirah, Dubai. The artist relocate it to a less developed beach, an odyssey to reclaim a lost paradise. The experiences of the jellyfish and the artist become interchangeable.
Majd Alloush, a Syrian exiled from his ancestral land, disrupts notions of geographical boundaries through his work, reimagining a possible future for his country of origin and questioning the borders and frontiers of a fraught past. The simplicity of a line becomes its vulnerability and abstracted aerial images chart a possible course through.
Sarah Almehairi upturns the notion of an original in her work, using found packaging materials that point to the immensity of trade, commerce and production in the UAE. Working with these packing materials, re-forming them from one medium to another in a continual process of reinvention, the notion of an original gradually disappears.
About Beyond Emerging Artists:
An annual programme organised by Abu Dhabi Art. The programme enables three commissioned artists to create or develop new work through funding and curatorial support. The commissioned works are exhibited first in Abu Dhabi and then internationally in diverse locations. Since 2021, this programme has been supported by Friends of Abu Dhabi Art.
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Khalid examines the materiality of everyday objects and coaxes out their metaphorical potential. Through fabricating receipts, playing with street cats, composing fictional tours and stealing corporate pens, he dissects ironies embedded in his everyday surroundings. What begins as an arbitrary flânerie, develops into a methodical formula that addresses philosophical and phenomenological, revealing the spatial, poetic relationships between his subjects and their correlation to human beings.
Khalid is an alumnus of the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship and Campus Art Dubai 7.0, with previous group shows at Art Dubai, Warehouse421 and Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
Khalid is a commissioned artist for Beyond: Emerging Artists 2022.
Majd Alloush is a Syrian artist whose work spans multiple disciplines including printmaking, sculpture, photography, moving image, installation and performance. His creative practice challenges the notion of borders in concept, content, and medium, by exploring geopolitics, and social and environmental issues such as the ramifications of war and displacement. Alloush strategically creates work wherein multiple interpretations are possible, requiring the viewer’s own worldview to inform the meaning. His work is situated within contemporary hybrid practice, at the intersection of traditional processes and innovative methodology.
Alloush holds a BFA from the University of Sharjah, Class of 2018, and is currently pursuing his MFA in Art and Media at NYU Abu Dhabi.
Majd Alloush is a commissioned artist for Beyond: Emerging Artists 2022.
Sarah Almehairi was born in Abu Dhabi in 1998, where she currently lives and works. She received her BA in Art and Art History from New York University Abu Dhabi.
Al Mehairi's overarching body of work unfolds a discourse on themes of materiality, systems and interrelations, memory, and language through the intuitive and poetic examination of narrative and abstraction. By engaging with geometric forms, she extracts and defines a structural language read time and time again to suggest a form other than its own, such as a map, sentence, or puzzle piece. Through the process, they are broken down, built and reassembled as continuous iterations of themselves. Working primarily within an investigative range of media, she explores the push and pull of material to evoke a story that both conceals and reveals itself.
Al Mehairi was part of the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship’s 7th Cohort (2019-2020). She is the creator of the Artist Talks series and co-founder of the JARA Collective.
Sarah Almehairi is represented by Carbon12 and is a commissioned artist for Beyond: Emerging Artists 2022.