DUBAI: The Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation and the Seoul Museum of Art have launched a joint publication celebrating a joint exhibition that took place in the UAE and South Korea this year.
Titled “Proximities,” one publication looks back on an exhibition of the same name that was hosted in Seoul. Presented at SeMA, Proximities brought together more than 110 works by 47 UAE-based artists, including 33 Emirati artists.
The first instalment of the exhibition series, “Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits,” co-curated by Maya El-Khalil and Kyung-Hwan Yeo, was held at Manarat Al Saadiyat in Abu Dhabi from May 16 to June 30 last year. It explored media-based practices from Korea spanning the 1960s to the present day.
“What I noticed was the willingness of audiences in Seoul to stay with complexity, to engage with practices rooted elsewhere without needing immediate explanation or translation,” El-Khalil told Arab News. “That reaffirmed something we had already sensed through ‘Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits’ — that familiarity isn’t a prerequisite for connection.”
El-Khalil also discussed key works that provoked an emotional response.
Concluding the two-part institutional collaboration, two joint publications were launched in March. (Supplied)
“What stays with me … are certain tensions that don’t resolve. In ‘Proximities,’ works like Mohammed Kazem’s ‘Window’ (2003-2005) hold that condition very precisely — proximity and exclusion existing at once, being near to something while remaining outside it,” she said.
Meanwhile, in “Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits,” the curator pointed to Bahc Yiso’s “UN Tower,” saying: “(It) struck me in a direct way. He reconstructs, in plywood, the pedestal of a monument that was never built. The tower itself is absent, cut out as a void. In the context of recent years, the idea of a symbol encoded with some idea of universal law or universal peace being so flimsy and transparent felt quite devastating.”
Reflecting on common themes shared by artists in both exhibitions, El-Khalil said: “Both Seoul and Abu Dhabi are cities that have been radically transformed within a single generation, and that produces certain ways of encountering the world — negotiating between inherited structures and speculative futures, between local specificity and global circulation. But those conditions don’t produce the same outcomes. The works remain very specific to their contexts.”
Concluding the two-part institutional collaboration, two joint publications were launched in March. These serve as a physical archive of the exhibitions, with the aim of forming a lasting record.
“They are not traditional catalogues. Rather than explaining the exhibitions, they extend them. We were interested in what happens when ideas move, when they are encountered in a different place, through a different language, and from a different position,” El-Khalil said.
The publications feature Korean writers responding to practices connected to the UAE, and writers based in the UAE responding to Korean works.
“The aim was not to produce fixed interpretations, but to open up different readings — to see how meaning changes depending on who is encountering the work, and from where. In that sense, the publications record something the exhibition alone cannot: how meaning shifts through encounter,” said El-Khalil.
