Opening 16 December 2025 – 22 February 2026, Proximities is a significant new group exhibition that brings together the work of artists long embedded in the dynamic and ever-transforming cultural landscape of the United Arab Emirates. On view at Seoul Museum of Art, the show brings together more than 80 works by 46 artists spanning three generations, including Hassan Sharif, Abdullah Al Saadi, Shaikha Al Mazrou, Ala Younis, Rand Abduljabbar and Jumairy. This milestone exhibition is the most comprehensive presentation of contemporary art from the UAE ever held in Korea.

Spanning photography, video, painting, sculpture, performance and installation, the exhibition traces how meaning transforms across generations and geographies, revealing subtle shifts shaped by exchange and cultural context. Presented by Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation (ADMAF) and Seoul Museum of Art as part of Abu Dhabi Festival, the exhibition examines how different forms of proximity – emotional, geographic, shared cultures and narratives – inform transformations without erasing difference. The exhibition is being held under the honorary founding patronage of His Highness Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, UAE Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Founding Honorary Patron of Abu Dhabi Festival.

Co-curated by Maya El Khalil and Eunju Kim, the exhibition unfolds through three propositions, each theme developed in partnership with artist collaborators, including Farah Al Qasimi, Mohammed Kazem and Cristiana de Marchi, and the artist trio Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian (RRH). Each section offers a distinct way of encountering the world, with focal points merging and contrasting world views. The artists’ curatorial interventions create worlds into which peers and audiences are invited for reflection, dialogue and discovery.

In the first section, Farah Al Qasimi's uncanny photographs appear amid other imagined and surreal domestic spaces, channeling a speculative picture of the Emirates from the 1990s to today. In the second, Mohammed Kazem and Cristiana de Marchi's meditations on experiences of physical and psychological disorientation are presented alongside large-scale installations exploring memory, displacement, and belonging. Finally, in the third section, the RRH trio organise their intervention around 回 – a square within a square – juxtaposing artefacts of nation-building, art objects from daily environments and elemental matter. In doing so, they dismantle familiar structures of imagination to reveal other possibilities. These three perspectives are articulated through works by established and emerging artists such as Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, Ebtisam Abdulaziz, Ayman Zedani, Nujoom Al Ghanem, Layan Attari, and Vikram Divecha, alongside many more.

The three generations of artists in the exhibition – born in the UAE and elsewhere, growing up amid and contributing to the country’s dynamic transformations – navigate between the individual and the collective, the local and the global. They mediate the push and pull of the contemporary and the traditional, layering regional contexts with history and emergent futures.

Displaced into Seoul's landscape, the works gain new resonance, showing how positions alter and understanding deepens when the familiar encounters the new. As meanings mutate through movement and translation, encounters reshape individual and collective world views. The exhibition’s accompanying publication Layered dialogues: proximities will feature texts written by Seoul-based writers prompted by the themes, deepening the dialogue between the two art scenes and framing the exhibition in the cultural context of Seoul.

The public programme accompanying the exhibition includes a series of panel discussions and artist film screenings. Further details of the public programme will be available online in due course.

Maya El Khalil, Co-Curator, said: “Proximities is an exhibition of multiple overlapping dynamics – institutional, creative, artist trios and duos, across geographies and generations. Collaborating with these idiosyncratic artist-curators, we did not attempt to translate or find equivalence; instead, we started from the idea that we each have an inherent position, but those views transform through encounter with others. Each section is a creative proposition for ways to experience a globalised world, starting from different approaches and moving through scales, from the domestic everyday to fabulation, the abstraction of personal and collective mapping, statecraft and the elemental. These collaborations challenged our own perspectives, and we hope audiences will feel those shifts too, becoming part of the ongoing exchanges.”

Eunju Kim, Co-Curator, said: “Through Proximities, we endeavour to delve into the profound contemporary resonance of artistic exchange between Korea and the UAE – a vital space where diverse worlds converge, not merely to meet, but to truly interact and generate open imagination, productive tension, and harmonious coexistence. Our aim with this exhibition was to meticulously weave together narratives that transcend geographical and cultural distances, inviting viewers to explore the intricate tapestry of human connection through the lens of artists connected to the UAE. I firmly believe that this collaborative initiative between the Seoul Museum of Art and the Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation will illuminate new pathways for nuanced dialogue and mutual understanding, enriching the cultural landscapes of both nations for years to come.”