Abu Dhabi Art To Bring Beyond: Emerging Artists To Italy For The First Time During La Biennale di Venezia

Abu Dhabi Art will present works from the 2021 edition of the Beyond: Emerging Artists programme at Palazzo Franchetti, Venice, Italy from 20 April to 22 May 2022, to coincide with the Biennale Arte 2022. For its first iteration in Italy, Beyond: Emerging Artists will showcase commissioned artists Christopher Joshua Benton, Maitha Abdalla and Hashel Al Lamki, who were supported by guest curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, co-founders of multidisciplinary curatorial platform Art Reoriented.

The Beyond: Emerging Artists initiative invites local and international curators to work with UAE-based emerging artists of their choosing in a year-round programme, enabling and supporting the artists to hone their skills and develop their professional practice. Participating artists are provided with a budget and curatorial support to create ambitious new works that are exhibited through Abu Dhabi Art.

Combining film, installation, and sculpture, Benton’s The World Was My Garden works with the palm tree as a metaphor for migration, labour economies and the history of slavery in the Gulf. The exhibition’s centerpiece is My Plant Immigrantsan almost three-metre-tall date palm tree suspended in the air.

Abdalla’s Too Close to the Sun encompasses sculpture, works on canvas and photography. The exhibition explores what the artist perceives as the wild nature of women that social forces have often attempted to tame, intertwining themes including the wildness of human nature, the archetype of the feminine psyche, and the untamable character of wild animals.

In this commissioned multidisciplinary work, Hashel Al Lamki charters various realms from the natural to the built and the imagined in order to foreground the scarcity of the earth’s resources and the way that these events impact the human psyche. The artist contends that climate change is pressing mankind to reconsider their existence, imagining alternative realities.

Beyond: Emerging Artists will be on show at Venice’s Palazzo Franchetti from 20 April to 22 May 2022.

Abu Dhabi Art will return to Manarat Al Saadiyat from 16 to 20 November 2022.

For more information on Abu Dhabi Art and its year-round programmes, visit abudhabiart.ae and follow Abu Dhabi Art on social media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube