Seoul Museum of Art’s “Proximities” Brought UAE Art Into Sharper Focus as War Escalated
When “Proximities” opened at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) last December, it arrived as a wide-ranging introduction to contemporary life in the United Arab Emirates. By the time it closed on March 29, the exhibition’s quiet attention to daily routines, social change, and contested landscapes was being read against a far more volatile backdrop: several weeks into a US-Israeli war on Iran that has rapidly widened to involve much of the Gulf and beyond.
Organized by the independent curator Maya El Khalil with SeMA staff curator Eunju Kim and six artist-curators, “Proximities” assembled more than 110 artworks by 47 UAE-based artists, including 33 Emirati artists. Installed across SeMA’s upper two floors, the exhibition set out to complicate the familiar international image of the UAE as a place of polished spectacle and gilded excess, instead foregrounding the textures of lived experience and the social realities that sit beneath the country’s architectural sheen.
El Khalil described a curatorial process shaped by autonomy and a deliberate multiplicity of viewpoints. “We were given complete freedom to really curate and think about the thematics without any interference,” she said. The aim, she added, was to present “multiple perspectives” from artists working in the UAE, including foreign resident artists, with works that “revisiting or commenting on a certain socio-political reality.”
Among the exhibition’s more quietly pointed works was Layan Attari’s “Zen Dubai Fountain Soothing Water Sounds for Relaxation, Meditation, and Inner Peace” (2019), a sculptural audio piece that plays recordings of the Dubai fountain’s water — stripped of its usual musical soundtrack — through an artificial conch shell. El Khalil framed the work as both poetic and critical: it evokes the UAE’s coastal history and relationship to the sea while gesturing toward land reclamation and the engineered landscapes of Dubai, where water can be as much a manufactured effect as a natural element.
The exhibition unfolded through sections shaped by artist-curators. It opened with “A Place for Turning,” curated by the photographer Farah Al Qasimi, which brought together her bright, maximalist photographs of private interiors with the video “Um Al Naar (Mother of Fire)” (2019), a mockumentary centered on a mischievous spirit — a jinn — drawn from Arabic folklore. Elsewhere, Shaikha Al Ketbi’s videos and photographs 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: the ache of spaces erased or transformed by rapid development.
In “Recording Distance, Not Topography,” curated by the artists Mohammed Kazem and Cristiana de Marchi, Kazem’s “Window 2003-2005” (2005) documented the construction of a Dubai high-rise as seen through a window. The photographs and videos also attend to the migrant laborers who built the tower and to the luxury hotel that followed — a destination, the exhibition notes, that social discrimination would likely keep those workers from ever entering.
“Proximities” was presented as a collaboration between SeMA and the Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation, and it aligns with SeMA’s longer-term interest in building direct cultural exchange with non-Western contexts. The museum has pursued similar frameworks before, including “Working for the Future Past,” a presentation of Latin American artists staged in 2017–18.
The Seoul exhibition also followed a reciprocal project: “Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits,” an exhibition of Korean art that opened in Abu Dhabi in May 2025 and was co-curated by El Khalil and SeMA curator Kyung-hwan Yeo.
National surveys can easily tip into soft-power branding, particularly for countries as politically and socially complex as the UAE. Here, the curatorial strategy largely resisted that gravitational pull. Instead of polishing a single national narrative, “Proximities” built a sense of place through fragments — domestic scenes, altered coastlines, half-empty leisure spaces, and the labor systems that make urban transformation possible.
Kim also positioned the exhibition as a conversation between two countries that have moved, within living memory, from colonial histories to accelerated economic growth. “The UAE and Korea have a very similar history,” she said, pointing to colonization by the UK in the UAE and by Japan in Korea, followed by rapid development and a comparable social environment.
Within that framework, “Proximities” gave particular weight to women’s voices, emphasizing feminist and female perspectives as central rather than supplementary. In the final weeks of the exhibition — as regional conflict intensified — that insistence on nuance, interiority, and lived complexity felt less like a curatorial preference than a necessary corrective to the flattening effects of geopolitics.
