The NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Art Gallery has announced two major exhibitions for Spring and Fall 2022, in addition to projects globally, including the National Pavilion UAE at Biennale Arte 2022 in Venice, and the UAE’s 50th anniversary exhibition at the Middle East Institute in Washington D.C.
Modernisms
Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection
On view until February 1
Abby Weed Grey was a North American collector who made multiple trips abroad in the 1960s and early 1970s, to explore and collect modern art from across Asia. She made eight trips to Iran, and four trips each to India and Turkey, where she acquired the prints, drawings, paintings, and sculpture that came to form the nucleus of the Abby Weed Grey Collection of Modern Asian and Middle Eastern art, housed at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery.
The exhibition sheds new light on famed artists such as Parviz Tanavoli, Fahrelnissa Zeid , and M.F. Husain , and also includes the collector’s personal letters, journals, invoices, catalogues, invitations, and photographs from the Abby Weed Grey Papers in the NYU Archives. The archives make visible how these artists drew on their specific heritages while also engaging in global discourses around key issues of modernity.
Parthenogenesis: Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Hesam Rahmanian.
March 1
The artists, originally from Iran, have adopted the UAE as their home. They are known for their immersive, surreal projects, performances, paintings, and animations, which have exhibited internationally, at multiple biennials and major museums (including Liverpool, Sydney, and Toronto biennials, and Kunsthalle Zurich, ICA Boston, MACBA Barcelona, and a forthcoming project at the Hayward Gallery, London). In their first institutional solo exhibition in the UAE, the artists create a landscape in the gallery that traces how an artwork grows itself through an artist’s relationships with others. Parthenogenesis is a testament to their 13 years in Dubai as artists living and working together, creating a landscape and tapestry of continuously evolving ideas and dialogues with collaborators, artists, and visitors to their home.
Khaleej Modern
Fall 2022
Khaleej Modern, a landmark historical survey of the last century of modern art movements across the GCC states, collectively known as the “Khaleej.” Curated by Dr. Aisha Stoby – who was recently announced as curator of the inaugural Oman Pavilion to the Venice Biennale – Khaleej Modern is based on her research, tracing the region’s pre-‘boom era’ of the early/mid-20th century through 2008. By analyzing the Gulf’s modern art history together for the first time, the exhibition promotes a wider conversation on more inclusive narratives relating to comparative modernities and art movements in the region, and will play a vital role in illuminating the art history of the Gulf. Dr. Aisha Stoby is an art historian and curator who has published and lectured widely on modernism in the Global South, with a particular interest in modern art movements in the Arabian Peninsula.
