“I’m curating one thing I don’t know but,” says the artist Issam Kourbaj, who’s placing collectively this 12 months’s Past Rising Artists programme at Abu Dhabi Artwork. “In earlier issues I’ve curated, I do know the objects, I’m placing them collectively. Right here I’m curating one thing immaterial and that was the magic for me.”
The annual venture brings collectively three up-and-coming artists primarily based within the United Arab Emirates to create works to be exhibited on the honest, which takes place 19-23 November at Manarat al-Saadiyat in Abu Dhabi. However the works are usually not completed but—in addition to curating the present, Kourbaj is mentoring the artists, serving to them to conceive and create one thing new. “They’re weaving their concepts and I’m weaving with them,” he explains.
Issam Kourbaj at his exhibition at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge Photograph: Courtesy Kettle’s Yard, College of Cambridge
Kourbaj is a famend and revered artist with an extended profession. Born in Syria, he educated in Damascus, St Petersburg and London, and now lives in Cambridge, UK, the place he teaches on the College of Cambridge, in addition to persevering with to exhibit his personal work. He picked the three individuals from a shortlist, on the lookout for artists who work in very completely different supplies, however who’re related by their response to position. “I wished to take the native and see how you could possibly amplify it to develop into a common language,” he explains.
Salmah Almansoori is from the western area of the UAE, now primarily based in Abu Dhabi. Her work is rooted in private reminiscence and the missed particulars of her hometown. Maktoum Al Maktoum’s work displays his cross-disciplinary schooling: he studied psychology and actual property planning. The third artist, Alla Abdunabi, is a British-Libyan whose observe explores the “materials afterlives of objects”.
The commissions can be on present in the course of the honest—which can be relaunched subsequent 12 months as Frieze Abu Dhabi—in a show titled Water Carves, Land Holds, Physique Remembers. “By means of their interventions, areas develop into vessels of collective meditation on what slips via, what holds on, and what we feature ahead,” says a curatorial textual content. “The artists invite viewers to replicate on how place shapes id, and the way artwork can reinterpret, protect, or reimagine cultural legacies.”
For the primary time this 12 months, the artists won’t simply current their commissions on the honest—they’ve additionally created work to be proven outdoor within the metropolis of Al Ain, round 80 miles from Abu Dhabi. “I instructed them I would love them to create two items,” says Kourbaj. “One on the honest, and one at Al Ain. They stand alone however they converse with one another. You see one a part of the story, then you definately see one other a part of the story.”
They are going to be positioned in and round Al Ain’s historic websites, together with the Al Ain Oasis, the Jebel Hafeet Tombs and the Al Jahili Fort. Kourbaj has additionally been commissioned to create a piece there, and all can be on present for round six months (19 November-26 April 2026), offering a a lot slower tempo than that of the honest.
“We live on the planet of the cell phone,” says Kourbaj. “This type of connection is turning into a part of our nature. However as an alternative of digital connection, I would like individuals to bodily to go to [both sites] and make a bridge between the 2 of them.”
The trio can even get an opportunity to indicate their work in prestigious venues world wide. The 2024 commissions by Fatma Al Ali, Dina Nazmi Khorchid and Simrin Mehra Agarwal, for instance, have been subsequently proven at Sotheby’s Maison in Hong Kong and the Saatchi Gallery in London, because of Abu Dhabi Artwork’s international associate, HSBC
Kourbaj is impressed with the younger artists and excited to see the completed works. “They’re nonetheless of their twenties however they’ve this sort of common place of their considering. They aren’t standing in a single place solely considering of that place, however they create a really lengthy neck someway to see what’s actually past their bodily existence.”
Abu Dhabi Artwork, Manarat al-Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi, 19-23 November
