Abu Dhabi Art 2024

Manarat Al Saadiyat, 20 - 24 Nov 2024 
E5 - Emerge Section 2-9 pm https://www.abudhabiart.ae
For Abu Dhabi Art 2024 Wusum Gallery presents the work of three Doha-based artists Hamad AlFayhani (Qatar, b. 1999), Noora Al Hardan (Qatar, b. 1999), and Ameni Abida (Tunisia, b. 1997), marking the participation of a Qatar-based art gallery for the first time in the fair's history. While in our E5 booth in the Emerge Section each artist offers a unique trajectory, their practices converge on a shared investigation of space–not simply as a physical structure, but as a lived experience, a memory, an allocator of belonging.
 

Hamad AlFayhani’s work delves into the psyche of ‘safe spaces’. Through abstract visual language, he explores the emotional facets of the spaces we deem protective, secure, or habilitating. AlFayhani invites us to consider how environments shape mental well-being, reminding us that physical boundaries and psychological states are often interconnected. 

 

Noora Al Hardan’s artistic practice involves a delicate excavation of neglected spaces, captured through photography and an innovative use of materiality. Al Hardan invites us to revisit places that are often dismissed or forgotten, questioning how these spaces implant themselves within our collective memory. In doing so, she invites us to reconsider the structures that silently shape cultural identity, encouraging  a re-examination of spaces we might otherwise overlook. 

 

Ameni Abida defines space from a deeply personal, almost diaristic approach. As a ‘third culture kid’, her work embodies the movement between geographies and the layering of cultural experiences that form her internal landscape. Her explorations navigate themes of identity and belonging, examining how one finds roots amid a series of relocations. Abida’s spaces are at once intimate and expansive, mirroring the complexity of negotiating selfhood within and across borders. 

 

Together, these artists offer a mediation on spatiality as a multidimensional experience. They encourage us to pause and rethink space as something beyond the tangible–conceiving it instead as a sphere for memory, identity, and emotional resonance. Through their perspectives, space transforms into a narrative, one that holds fragments of personal and collective histories.