This exhibition presented select works from the Salama Bint Hamdan Emerging Artist Fellowship’s (SEAF) eight-year tenure, pulling threads and recurring themes of research that persist through different cohorts. From painting, textile, video, and photography, the selection reflects a collective questioning of memory to place, time, and a sense of rhythm and repetition.
Titled “Speculative Links,” the exhibition brings together artists who retrospectively seem to have experimented during the fellowship with abstract patternology, participatory narration, geo-mapping, digital dislocation and fabrication through the lens of research. The show attempts to reflect on the relationship between art pedagogy and production, and the connection forged between the artists’ authentic voice and the processes and critiques that shape their practice.
The exhibition gives a sense of how artists from different cohorts responded to the program, producing works that resonated achronically with each other, and mapping a collective sense of vulnerable and precarious placement. The artists’ work spans a wide range of practices, including painting, drawing, engraving, mixed media, and embroidery, exploring from personal memories, to social commentaries, as well highlighting the intense homing desire.
The exhibition is Curated by Maryam Al Dabbagh and Mays Albaik, and includes works by:
Asma Khoory
Tala Worrell
Dina Nazmi Khorchid
Sawsan Al Bahar
Shaikha Al Ketbi
Fatima Al Budoor
Mohamed Khalid
Malak Elghuel.
This exhibition is commissioned by Warehouse421 in collaboration with The Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artist Fellowship (SEAF) and Art Dubai.
Warehouse421 is a creative center located in Mina Zayed, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, and is dedicated to emerging creative practitioners and those who want to access art and harness it as an agent for inquiry, education, and growth.
Sawsan Al Bahar
Born in Damascus and raised in the U.A.E, Sawsan is an artist, architect and researcher based in Dubai. Sawsan seeks the discreet ways history has influenced culture in the region, narrating her notion of home as myth within works of graphite on paper, digital scans, and text. An intense draftsmanship is the basis of her work, and she employs digital-scanning to access and depict an absent homeland. Her meticulously drawn poetic entanglements fall at the crossroads of past and future, evoking an intimate past image, and her text and the titles of her works highlight to the viewer the tension between the real and the fabricated.
Mohamed Khalid
Khalid examines the materiality of everyday objects and coaxes out their metaphoric 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 frangible correlation to human beings.
Khalid is alumnus of programs Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship and Campus Art Dubai 7.0 with previous group shows at Art Dubai, Warehouse421 and Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Malak Elghuel
Malak Elghuel is a Libyan multidisciplinary artist with a graduate degree in Multimedia Design from the American University of Sharjah. She has exhibited her work in the green book exhibition at Le Cube Independent Art Room in Rabat, Morocco, Retracing a Disappearing Landscape in P21 Gallery London, UK, Art Jameel Youth Takeover in Dubai, UAE, and Pop Art from North Africa at the Casa Arabe in Madrid, Spain.
Through her work, Malak examines the social and political changes in the Mena region, specifically her home country. With a focus on time, as both a measure of change, an invisible vessel for documentation and as a medium.
Fatima Albudoor
A Dubai born and raised artist, Fatima Albudoor received her BFA Studio Art with Graphic Design minor from Northeastern University in Boston, USA (2014). She is a graduate of the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artist Fellowship (2016), and has exhibited in Art Dubai, DIFC Art Nights, in Abu Dhabi and internationally in Boston and Venice. Fatima is a photographer and printmaker, with her work ranging from photos, prints, fabric paintings, and art books. Fatima currently works out of her studio in Dubai.
Dina Nazmi Khorchid
In her practice, Dina Khorchid (Palestinian, b. 1987) translates her growing interest in textiles, printmaking, interiors, nature and food culture into a process driven exploration of mark-making and material studies. Portrayed as works on paper and fabric, her domestic as well as diasporic outlook on subject-matter navigates a personal space, landscape or language of connection, in relation to the fragility of loss, preservation and memory access. Creating designed order to maneuver through the chaotic, nostalgic, burdened and anxious mind.
Dina’s work has been showcased in various group shows, including ‘Keyword Palestine II (2020) at the Institute for Palestine Studies – Washington, United States of America, HWP Open Studios (2019) at Ashkal Alwan – Beirut, Lebanon, ’Ishara: Signs, Symbols & Shared Languages’ (2018) at Concrete, Alserkal Avenue – Dubai, United Arab Emirates, ‘Community & Critique: SEAF 2016/1017 Cohort 4’ (2017) at Warehouse421 – Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ (2014) at the Liverpool Arab Arts Festival – Liverpool, United Kingdom, and ‘Vibrations Within’ (2009) at Tashkeel – Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Dina was a fellow at the Ashkal Alwan Home Workspace Program (HWP, 2018-2019) and the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship (SEAF, 2016-2017). She received a Bachelors in Visual Communication from the American University of Sharjah (AUS, 2009). She is currently pursuing a Masters of Fine Arts in Textiles at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD, 2021-2023), where she is a recipient of the Society of Presidential Fellows Award.
Asma Khoory
Asma Khoory is an artist born in Dubai. She graduated in 2017 with a BFA from Zayed University, and in 2018 she was part of the fifth cohort of The Salama Bint Hamdan Emerging Artist Fellowship in partnership with the Rhode Island School of Design. Asma is currently pursuing her MA in Anthropology and Museum Practice at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has been exhibited locally and internationally at Meem Gallery, Warehouse 421, Al Serkal Avenue, Jameel Arts Center, Nieuw Dakota in Amsterdam, and Southeast Missouri State University. She investigates reality, memory, and narrative and how they often merge or contradict one another through materials. She is interested in the intersection of personal memory versus public memory in museums. Asma’s artistic practice revolves around themes of manufactured time, human relations and conversations, hazy dreams, and collective memory through the mediums of painting and mixed media.
Shaikha Al Ketbi
Shaikha Al Ketbi is a visual artist whose multimedia practice spans photography, drawing and installation art. Her work explores themes of self-awareness and blurs the line between fiction and reality. Much of her current practice involves instantaneous performative responses to isolated landscapes, framed through her vivid, experiential dreams.
Al Ketbi is a graduate of Zayed University and her work has been included in exhibitions including the 2018 Arab Women Artists Now exhibition ‘Perpetual Movement’ in London, 2018; Art Bahrain 2018; Armenia Art Fair 2018; UAE Unlimited’s ‘Ishara: Signs, Symbols and Shared Languages’ exhibition 2018; the Zayed University graduate exhibition in 2016; ‘Collectivity’ at Maraya Art Centre; and the 2018 Tribe Magazine’s ‘Tribe: Contemporary Photography from the Arab World’ in Washington, DC. She participated in the Salama bint Hamdan Al Nayhan Foundation Emerging Artists Fellowship from 2016-17. She is also one of the founding members of the Public Art Collective, a group dedicated to the research and advancement of public art dialogue in the UAE.
Tala Worrell
Tala Worrell (b. 1991, New York) is a Lebanese– American painter who grew up in Abu Dhabi. Living and working between Abu Dhabi, Beirut, and New York, Worrell’s paintings hone in on the texture of strange intimate moments that make up the perceptual experience of being both an insider and outsider. Worrell earned her BA in Visual Arts from Brown University in 2014. In 2015 she was a fellow at Ashkal Alwan’s Homework Space Program in Beirut, Lebanon. In 2016, Worrell was a fellow of the Salama bint Ham dan Foundation Emerging Artists Fellowship (SEAF) in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Her works have been shown in several group exhibitions in London, Beirut, New York and Abu Dhabi. Worrell is currently pursuing her MFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design.
