Curated by Gaith Abdulla
Adele Bea-Cipste | Afra Alsuwaidi | Ahed Alameri | Ali Al-Hosani | Alina El Assadi | Andres Ugartechea | Aya Afaneh | Aysha Alhashimi | Bao | Carlos Paez | Farah Fawzi Ali | Jude Maharme | Katya Warm | Khaled Esguerra | Layla Doueidi | Maryam Abdulrahman | Mowaffag Elsadig | Nada Almosa | Neel Jassani | Parneet Pahwa | Rabila Kidwai | Saif Mhaisen
Early-career practice is approached in this exhibition as a site of accumulation rather than emergence: a condition thick with residue; of expectation, institutional extraction and instrumentalisation, and futures repeatedly deferred.
The exhibition resists the language of “ new voices and the optimism it presumes, attending instead to what is misaligned or structurally fragile within early-career practice in the UAE, what development obscures as much as what it enables.”
Development is examined less as support than as a testing ground, where premature demands for legibility, productivity, and market readiness are placed on artists before conditions for sustained practice are in place. What appears as freshness is often produced through expectation, exhaustion, and structural gaps that remain largely unspoken.
Rather than smoothing these conditions into promise, the exhibition sits with their weight, tracing how practices take form not through opportunity, but through negotiation with sustained uncertainty. It asks what is misaligned or structurally fragile within early-career practice. Development here is neither linear nor aspirational. It is uneven and burdened, shaped by institutional absences, compressed timelines, and the quiet labour required to survive visibility