BEYOND EMERGING ARTISTS 2020

Beyond Emerging Artists is an annual initiative supporting three emerging UAE-based artists in developing their practice and creating ambitious new works. Each year, a guest curator selects and mentors the artists through a year-long programme of workshops and studio visits. This culminates in the presentation of their commissioned projects at Abu Dhabi Art in November, with the works remaining on public display for several months after the fair.

Curator: Maya El-Khalil

Artists: Afra Al Dhaheri | Afra Al Suwaidi | Hind Mezaina

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Location 1: Manarat Al Saadiyat – Gallery S

Dates: 19 | 11 | 2020 – 31 | 12 | 2020

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Location 2: Cromwell Place, London.

Dates: 4 | 6 | 2021 – 13 | 6 | 2021

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Premise:

In a year marked by forced hiatus, our experience of time has become fragmented. Abandoned plans have unsettled our sense of the future, while prolonged periods of isolation have led to deeper reflections on the past. These conditions have opened up fertile ground for revisiting the nature and function of memory—collective and cultural, personal and psychological. Through distinct visual languages and processes, Afra Al Dhaheri, Afra Al Suwaidi, and Hind Mezaina each explore how memory is held, formed, and transformed.

Afra Al Dhaheri begins with memory as a bodily experience. Drawing on physical traces such as hair—her own and those symbolically charged within cultural and social constructs—she unravels identity through materials and form. Her work delves into the architecture of spirals and the act of casting, where absence becomes as significant as presence. Through these structures, she constructs poetic meditations on time, embodiment, and the elusive nature of recollection.

Afra Al Suwaidi contends with memory as a process of reckoning. Her childhood, marked by emotional tension, becomes the source material for works that reassemble experience into composed artefacts. Using collage as a primary mode of expression, she embraces fragmentation and juxtaposition to reflect the complexities of personal history. This practice, at once analytical and cathartic, transforms trauma into something tangible—an object to be examined, confronted, and, perhaps, understood.

Hind Mezaina turns to the collective sphere of memory, unearthing overlooked moments from the UAE’s cultural past. Her starting point—the country’s surprising participation in the 1980s World Disco Championships—opens a portal into an informal archive of pop-cultural memory. Through multimedia exploration, internet fragments, and anecdotal layering, she reconstructs this ephemeral history, revealing how nostalgia, humor, and digital archaeology can breathe new life into forgotten narratives.

Together, these artists trace the shapes of memory in material, gesture, and image. In doing so, they map out new territories for understanding how we carry the past, and how the past continues to shape us.

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Beyond: Emerging Artists is an annual initiative that launched in 2017. The programme provides three emerging artists in the UAE with a platform from which to develop their practice and realise ambitious art projects. The selected artists are chosen by a guest curator each year. They undertake a year-long programme of workshops and studio visits initiatied by the guest curator which leads toward the realisation of a project for the Abu Dhabi Art fair in November. The works remain on exhibition to the public for several months beyond the fair dates.

Hind Mezaina

A Performance in Valour is a study and a work in progress consisting of found footage, stock imagery, memes, news reports, movie clips and search results. An observation on masculinity, class, national identity and representation, specific to the UAE.
Its starting point is the 1980 World Disco Dancing Championship which included a participant from the United Arab Emirates.
The video will evolve and change throughout the duration of the exhibition.

Hind Mezaina
A Performance of Valour, 2020
Video: 8min
Courtesy of the artist

Afra Al Dhaheri

Examining hair as a container of time and memory. Hair holds a nuance of similarities and differences in distinct cultures and stands to represent diverse connotations. Hair, like plants when nurtured and nourished, grows long and flourishes. Thinking of this organic form, an extension of the body as a container of time, I view the hair strand as a measuring tapelength as a representation of time and duration as a representation of the accumulation process.
Experimenting with alternative materials as hair allows me to explore the interventive gesture caused by hair holding forms of memory and breaking away from the presentable notions of hair.
This commission presents a rooted tangent from my explored narrative and research. Furthering my examination of hair as a container of time and memory thus allowing hair to be an expressive language through its form and state. Arriving at a moment where both time and space are contained, time was suddenly granted back to me at a pace much slower than that experienced before - a pace that made me nostalgic and reminiscent of the 90’s. A pace that challenged myself further to investigate time consuming processes, allowing me to dive into the narrative of hair, exploring hair as a medium and meaning within the medium.

Afra Al Dhaheri
To Detangle, 2020
Rope, artist’s hair and cotton
Courtesy of the artist

Afra Al Dhaheri
Tasreeha, 2020
Cotton rope
Courtesy of the artist

Afra Al Suwaidi

“You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow.”
Excerpt from On Children, Gibran Khalil Gibran, The Prophet.
When the past holds hidden stories, how can a cohesive sense of self be constituted in the present?
Un-/Sheltered, Afra Al Suwaidi’s presentation, is one of withholding and glimpsing. The structure that frames and holds her works is layered to obscure and emphasise different elements, which can be viewed as a whole, from different perspectives, or by squeezing into the claustrophobic spaces between the struts and panels. In this navigation, different views will reveal themselves.
The process will also take place temporally, with pieces added throughout the exhibition. Each individual ‘scene’ uses collage techniques to compose what appear as architectural details, their openings exposing strange scenes that suggest unspoken violations. Dichotomies of inside/outside, hidden/ revealed come into play as the juxtaposition of materials perform and order tense complexities of withholding and confronting.

Afra Al Suwaidi
Un-/Sheltered, 2020
Collage and mixed media
Courtesy of the artist