The Project Space at NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery is all set to kick off 2024 with Being Borrowed: On Egyptian Migration to the Gulf
Kick off 2024 on an artsy note with the latest exhibition at The NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Art Gallery’s auxiliary venue, the Project Space.
Check out Being Borrowed: On Egyptian Migration to the Gulf as it opens on Thursday, 11 January. The public reception kicks off at 5.30pm featuring 21 Egyptian artists and curated by Farah Hallaba, Farida Youssef, and Ali Zaaray, is the result of an interdisciplinary and transnational collaboration that was first presented in Cairo in 2022.
The theme of Arab migration to the Arabian Gulf brings the authors of this project together with NYUAD faculty Laure Assaf’s research. For Hallaba, the exploration of migration from Egypt to the Gulf stemmed from personal experience, and a feeling of empathy and helplessness towards her father who is still in the Gulf. She could not help but see her familial and personal experience as part of a larger, widely occurring phenomenon, one that weighs on many Egyptians.
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Being Borrowed reflects this shared experience through the outcomes of a series of collaborative workshops. Co-curator Youssef, in turn, maps the experience of living in the Gulf onto the space of the gallery, loosely following the chronology of a person’s life cycle.
The temporal nature of this curatorial proposal lays out the themes pertaining to migration. As Assaf studies second-generation Arab migrants who were born and grew up in Abu Dhabi, and their relationships with Emirati youth in an urban society shaped by migration, her research and parallel program of talks and events compliments and expands on the exhibition project.
Being Borrowed is part of a larger aim to produce accessible knowledge that invites people to question and to feel. Migration and its effects–on families, affects, homes – is a widely shared experience; there is much to gain by opening the doors of knowledge production beyond academia, and inviting the public to take part in this process.
Don’t miss out!
Date
11 January to 7 February
Location
The Project Space, The NYUAD Art Gallery
For more information, visit nyuad-artgallery.org/en_US/arts-center-project-space/being-borrowed/
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