Seoul Museum of Art’s UAE Survey “Proximities” Closed as War Reframed Its Themes
When “Proximities,” a sweeping survey of art from the United Arab Emirates, opened at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) last December, its curators were intent on something quietly corrective: to complicate the familiar image of the UAE as a place defined by spectacle and gilded excess. By the time the exhibition closed on March 29, that premise had been overtaken by events. Several weeks into a rapidly escalating US-Israeli war on Iran — a conflict that has expanded to involve much of the Gulf and beyond — the show’s attention to everyday life and subtle social shifts in the UAE began to read like a record of a suddenly distant, pre-war normal.
Co-organized by independent curator Maya El Khalil with SeMA staff curator Eunju Kim, “Proximities” brought together more than 110 artworks by 47 UAE-based artists, including 33 Emirati artists. Installed across SeMA’s upper two floors, the exhibition was shaped in collaboration with six artist-curators, a structure El Khalil said was central to its ambitions.
“We were given complete freedom to really curate and think about the thematics without any interference,” El Khalil said. “The whole idea was actually to present the multiple perspectives of these artists, of the work that’s taking place in the UAE, and also [art by] foreign resident artists. So there’s a lot of works that are revisiting or commenting on a certain socio-political reality.”
Among the works El Khalil highlighted was Layan Attari’s “Zen Dubai Fountain Soothing Water Sounds for Relaxation, Meditation, and Inner Peace” (2019), a sculptural audio piece that isolates the sound of water from Dubai’s famous fountain — stripped of its usual musical score — and channels it through an artificial conch shell. The gesture is both sensorial and pointed: a coastal nation’s relationship to the sea, refracted through engineered leisure and the remaking of land.
“It’s quite an interesting and poetic work,” El Khalil said, pointing to the UAE’s maritime history as well as the scale of reclamation and development that has transformed the shoreline. In Attari’s piece, the fountain’s familiar choreography becomes something more ambiguous: a manufactured nature, heard rather than seen.
The exhibition opened with “A Place for Turning,” curated by photographer Farah Al Qasimi. Her section paired bright, maximalist photographs of private interiors with the video “Um Al Naar (Mother of Fire)” (2019), a mockumentary built around a mischievous spirit — a jinn — that slips between folklore and contemporary domestic life. Elsewhere, Shaikha Al Ketbi’s photographs and videos introduced faceless, spectral figures haunting emptied pools and abandoned playgrounds, including “Sigh” (2019) and “Al Ukhra” (2019). The works register a particular kind of nostalgia: not only for childhood spaces, but for landscapes altered by rapid construction and disappearance.
Another section, “Recording Distance, Not Topography,” curated by artists Mohammed Kazem and Cristiana de Marchi, turned to the built environment and the labor behind it. Kazem’s “Window 2003-2005” (2005) — photographs and videos made from a single vantage point — follows the rise of a Dubai high-rise and, crucially, the lives of the migrant laborers who constructed it. The project traces a familiar arc of urban transformation, then lingers on its social asymmetries: the luxury hotel that emerges is, because of discrimination, a place many of its builders are unlikely to enter.
Institutionally, “Proximities” was a collaboration between SeMA and the Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation, and it aligns with SeMA’s longer-term effort to build direct cultural exchange with non-Western contexts without relying on Western intermediaries. The museum has pursued similar frameworks before, including “Working for the Future Past,” a Latin American-focused exhibition staged in 2017–18.
The Seoul presentation also followed an earlier exchange: “Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits,” an exhibition of Korean art that opened in Abu Dhabi in May 2025. That project was co-curated by El Khalil and SeMA curator Kyung-hwan Yeo, establishing a two-way institutional relationship rather than a one-off national showcase.
National surveys can easily slide into soft-power messaging, particularly in countries as politically and socially complex as the UAE. Here, the curatorial approach largely resisted that gravitational pull. Instead of polishing a national brand, “Proximities” worked to build a textured sense of place — and to draw parallels with South Korea as a former colony that underwent rapid economic transformation.
“The UAE and Korea have a very similar history,” Kim said. “We [experienced] colonisation from Japan and the UAE [experienced] colonisation from the UK. Both had a very rapid process of development economically [and] share a very similar social environment.”
One of the exhibition’s clearest through-lines was the prominence of women artists and feminist perspectives, foregrounding the varied, under-acknowledged contours of women’s experiences in the region — and the ongoing struggle, as the show suggested, to be heard with precision rather than stereotype. In the shadow of war, that insistence on nuance became the exhibition’s most enduring argument: that the textures of daily life, once disrupted, are not easily recovered — but they can be remembered, and insisted upon, through art.
