Latest news with #ManaratAlSaadiyat
Al Etihad
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Al Etihad
Emirati artist Dana Al Dhaen captures nature's hidden worlds in captivating visuals
26 June 2025 23:04 MAYS IBRAHIM (ABU DHABI)Armed with a macro lens, a patient eye, and a vivid imagination, Dana Al Dhaen attempts to uncover often-overlooked microcosms in the natural world that reveal themselves only to those who stop and look closely. Her work 'Imprints of the Invisible' is displayed as part of the 'Cartographies, Revised' group exhibition at Manarat Al Saadiyat, showcasing the artworks of seven emerging artists from the Photography Studio's four-month Dhaen is an Emirati artist with a bachelor's degree in environmental science and sustainability. From an early age, she has been drawn to the natural world. 'I was that curious kid who is always playing grass and wanting to pet the ants,' she shared in a recent interview with Aletihad. Al Dhaen merges photography with digital art to create captivating visual narratives with fantastical creatures. Her approach involves capturing extreme close-ups of smaller plants or other subtle elements in nature, then overlaying them with imaginative, digitally drawn her art, she taps into pareidolia, a phenomenon in which people perceive meaningful images in random stimuli, like faces in Dhaen views these moments, not as illusions, but as creative catalysts that guide her digital interventions. 'I take a macro photo, then I stay with it. I reflect on it daily for weeks, and slowly, I start seeing these unexpected creatures. I draw them, and until I feel the image is complete and no other creatures are speaking out to me — then I know it's done,' she explained. 'Whatever is happening to me at that moment might influence what I draw.'Though nature has many muses, its quieter members are what grips Al Dhaen's attention. 'The underdogs of nature, in my humble opinion, are plants,' she said. 'Animals make sounds, move and play around. Plants are quiet, but they possess incredible capabilities and resilience. They just don't announce it loudly. You have to look carefully.'This philosophy is echoed throughout Al Dhaen's exhibition layout. Her photographs are grouped in two ways: some are mounted at eye level, while others are placed horizontally on slightly elevated platforms, compelling viewers to intentionally direct their gaze down. The 'Cartographies, Revised' group exhibition runs at Manarat Al Saadiyat from Monday to Sunday, 10am to 8pm, until September 1.
Al Etihad
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Al Etihad
How UAE residents grow pockets of green in unexpected urban spaces
26 June 2025 23:08 MAYS IBRAHIM (ABU DHABI)In the alleyways behind shops, along the fringes of industrial zones, and beneath the drip of air-conditioning units, small gardens are quietly flourishing across cities in the UAE. Polish photographer Anna Jopp has turned her lens toward these unassuming patches of greenery, often improvised and tended by hands rarely seen. Her latest work, 'On Gardening,' now on display at the 'Cartographies, Revised' exhibition at Manarat Al Saadiyat, is a visual study of how plants survive and thrive in urban spaces across the Emirates. 'It started with the obvious; the decorative green areas planted along streets. But, very quickly, I became fascinated by what was growing in unexpected places,' Jopp shared with Aletihad in a recent interview. From a few potted flowers placed outside a corner shop to makeshift vegetable gardens tucked between warehouses, Jopp's images document the subtle human impulse to nurture nature.'I wanted to look at how people express a love for gardening out in the open in public, informal, and often unnoticed ways,' she explained. That might mean a cluster of planters on a busy sidewalk, or vines trained up the side of a residential building. In industrial areas, Jopp found fruit trees and vegetables growing in plots tended by workers. In some cases, irrigation systems were ingeniously improvised such as plants positioned to catch water dripping from AC pipes.'What I learned is that even in a very big city, people very often want to be connected to nature, and it can be done for them in the form of parks or little squares with trees,' Jopp noted.'But I found that people have this universal need to take care of something - in this case, plants. People want to be working with their hands, cultivating plants, and taking care of the green areas around them. It's one of the ways you can create a sense of home wherever you are.'The 'On Gardening' series is part of the Photography Studio's four-month residency programme in Abu Dhabi, which hosted seven emerging artists. Jopp says the mentorship she received helped her go beyond aesthetics and think critically about the message behind her work.'At first, I wanted to photograph every plant I saw,' she said. 'But through the fellowship, I began to focus on what story am I trying to tell? What does this add to my larger body of work? How am I growing as an artist?'Now, as she prepares to move to Fujairah, Jopp is already thinking about her next project within the emirate's rich farming heritage and proximity to the mountains.'I want to understand the landscape better; the people, the plants, how gardening happens in that part of the country,' she said. 'And also, how climate change and rising temperatures are changing the way people grow things and care for nature.' 'Cartographies, Revised' runs daily at Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi, from 10am to 8pm until September 1.
Korea Herald
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
Abu Dhabi hosts first joint exhibition of Korean art with SeMA
'Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits' introduces modern and contemporary Korean art to UAE with narrative that resonates across cultures ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Seeing familiar artwork presented in a novel manner, in a different context and a different environment, might be what is needed to awaken one to new possibilities and stimulate new thinking. 'Layered Medium: We Are in Open Ciruits,' an exhibition of modern and contemporary Korean art running at Manarat Al Saadiyat in Abu Dhabi, UAE, through June 30, succeeds in doing just that. The exhibition, co-organized by Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) and Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation and presented as part of Abu Dhabi Festival 2025, is a thoughtfully curated show of works by some of the best-known modern and contemporary Korean artists today, flown nearly 7,000 kilometers and assembled in a new way. The exhibition's co-curators, SeMa curator Yeo Kyung-hwan and UK-based curator Maya El Khalil, have created a narrative that is both fresh and thought-provoking. The Abu Dhabi exhibition is inspired by the SeMA exhibition 'At the End of the World Split Endlessly,' curated by Yeo, which revisited modern and contemporary Korean works in the city museum's collection last year. For "Layered Medium," the co-curators added several works that were not in the Seoul exhibition with the aim of easing visitors into Korea's modern and contemporary art. The new arrangement of the works and the scenography by Formafantasma, a Milan- and Rotterdam-based design studio, enrich the exhibition experience for those newly introduced to the works and perhaps even more so for those already familiar with them. The exhibition, whose title borrows from a statement by video art pioneer Paik Nam-june, opens with the artist's 'Self-Portrait Dharma Wheel' (1998) and an archive table showing how artistic innovations of the 1960s and 1970s occurred alongside Korea's economic and political developments, and how Korea's growing connection to a wider world shapes artistic practice today. Also shown in this first section, 'Open(ing) Circuits,' is Paik's 'Moon is the Oldest TV' (1965-1976) that links looking at the moon, an ancient practice, to contemporary screen-watching. Works by Kim Ku-lim, one of the first Korean artists to utilize electricity and light in challenging artistic conventions, are another important addition to the exhibition, giving a fuller account of the development of modern and contemporary art of Korea. A piece notable for the absence of the body, 'Method of Drawing' by Lee Kun-young, marks the start of the next section, 'Body as Medium.' The body is used as the medium, the paintings display the movements, and the negative space created results in an unintended figurative image, the artist said of the series begun in 1976. Lee Bul's 2006 work, 'Untitled (Crystal Figure),' gets a space of its own where 'feminine' materials such as crystals sparkle as they outline a female form, questioning how female bodies have been represented and understood. The question of how contexts influence cultural translation is the subject of 'Society as Medium' section. 'Under the Sky of Happiness' (2013) by Hong Young-in draws many young women visitors, according to a docent, who discover several historical women figures for the first time. Depicting Korean women hailed for being the 'first woman' in their respective fields, the work brings to the fore the marginalized history of women through embroidery, a practice that is often associated with low-wage labor. Background knowledge of the work — it reimagines a 1974 film about Korean laborers stranded in Sakhalin after World War II, replacing the male protagonists with female pioneers — is not necessary to appreciate the modern history of women in Korea. Three video works by Jun So-jung — 'Early Arrival of Future' (2015), 'Eclipse' (2020) and 'Green Screen' (2021) — explore the state of division of the Korean Peninsula. 'Early Arrival of Future' depicts two pianists, one a North Korean defector and the other a South Korean, as they collaborate in performing popular works from the two countries divided by the Demilitarized Zone. 'Eclipse,' meanwhile, juxtaposes the North Korean version of the ancient 12-string Korean instrument gayageum and the harp, an ancient Western instrument. The 21-string North Korean gayageum was created so that it may be used to perform Western music. The irony of the primordial forests of the Demilitarized Zone, the most heavily fortified border in the world, will not be lost on those watching "Green Screen.' An installation that may not be easily understood by non-Korean audiences is Bahc Yi-so's 'The UN Tower' (1997). An addition to the Abu Dhabi exhibition, the installation reconstructs the pedestal of a nonexistent monument — an image familiar to the Korean audience who have seen it on matchboxes once ubiquitous in Korean homes. 'We included this work because it articulates the impossibility of true cultural translation,' El Khalil says in the curatorial statement. While some works may be impossible to translate across different cultural contexts, on display in the last section "Space as Medium," Yang Hae-gue's 'Yes-I=Know-Screen' (2007), a set of 10 wood screens with wooden lattices that challenges boundaries between artworks, inside and outside, has resonated with the audiences here. Visitors often comment on the similarities between the lattice patterns and patterns found in Islamic art, said ADMAF Executive Director Michel Gemayel. The experience of attempting to extract similarities in the unfamiliar is a universal one. The exhibition ends on a positive note for cross-cultural translation and comprehension. The last work in the exhibition, 'Dancing Ladders' (2022) by Kwon Byung-jun, has visitors linger in front of the slow-moving inverted robotic ladders. The feeling of being stuck in the arduous condition the work depicts and elicits in viewers is a sentiment easily shared by people everywhere living in today's hyperconnected, globalized world.
Korea Herald
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
'Open Circuits' in Abu Dhabi explores curatorial collaboration
The exhibition 'Layered Medium: We Are In Open Circuits' runs through Monday Collaborating on an exhibition sometimes poses challenges, as it requires constant communication and research until the curators succeed in drawing a visual narrative together. The metaphor 'open circuits' in the exhibition 'Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits' embodies not only the content of the exhibition itself but the process of co-curation. The exhibition, which is on view at Manarat Al Saadiyat in Abu Dhabi, is the first-ever exhibition in the Middle East to comprehensively show Korean art spanning from the 1960s to the present. It was co-curated by UK-based independent curator Maya El Khalil and Yeo Kyung-hwan of the Seoul Museum of Art. 'Creating a meaningful dialogue between curators from two countries required considerable time -- it took over a year and a half for us to evolve our genuine dialogue between perspectives and visions into the exhibition,' El Khalil said in a recent interview with The Korea Herald. The collaborative process itself mirrored the exhibition's central concept of "open circuits,' she said. Inspired by a 1965 statement by Korean-born video art founder Paik Nam-june that says, 'we are in open circuits,' the exhibition shows how Korean contemporary art can be interpreted in different contexts depending on the viewers, curators and the region. 'We focused on how artists have used shifts in artistic mediums to reflect on the changes that happened to them, and how they used art, new technology and innovations across media and form to process and synthesize those changes. 'Visitors appreciate that these aren't just Korean stories, but shared contemporary experiences,' El Khalil said. Yeo said working with El Khalil triggered a change in perspectives for co-curation, which she had considered 'almost impossible.' The exhibition in Abu Dhabi evolved from an exhibition in Seoul held last year, titled 'SeMA Omnibus: At the End of the World Split Endlessly," which reexamined the museum's collection. 'The original concept and exhibition were renewed and revisited for our current exhibition as a result of my co-curation with Maya El Khalil,' Yeo said. 'The exhibition is a form of storytelling, highlighting how different generations of artists responded to key moments in Korea's political and cultural history. 'By framing this in a non-linear, conceptual way, we offer audiences in Abu Dhabi a deeper understanding of how Korean avant-garde art was shaped by and continues to shape larger global narratives,' she said. Forty-eight works in the exhibition include those by artists who have recently garnered global attention -- such as Lee Bul, Yang Hae-gue, Lee Kun-yong, Chung Seo-young and Kang Seok-yeong -- demonstrating how Korean contemporary art has continuously renewed itself in a changing world. 'This mirrors the dynamic cultural identity of Abu Dhabi, where the traditions of the past and the drive for innovation coexist, highlighting that we are standing within an open circuit,' Yeo added. A companion exhibition, 'Intense Proximities,' will take place in December at Seoul Museum of Art, featuring a collection from Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation, the co-organizer of the Abu Dhabi exhibition along with SeMA, as well as other significant works by UAE-based practitioners. 'For the past decade, the focus of the Seoul Museum of Art's international exchanges has primarily been with non-Western regions, such as Asia, the Middle East and South America. We are no longer concerned with following the Western art flow or its historical canon,' Yeo said. She continued: 'Rather, our focus lies in the recognition of art as one of many diverse branches, with increasing attention to the historical and cultural 'glocal' context that shapes each region's unique identity.' El Khalil suggests art serves as a 'crucial interface' for processing and relating to the changing world on different scales, and as a curator, she believes she creates frameworks that allow audiences to encounter shared experiences. 'It's about dialogue and opening circuits of meaning rather than simply presenting objects or delivering predetermined messages,' she said of her curatorial philosophy. 'In our increasingly complex world, fraught with technological, social, geopolitical and urban change, art shows us that we're not passive observers but always active participants creating meaning and connection,' she added.
Broadcast Pro
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Broadcast Pro
Korean Film Festival returns to UAE for ninth edition
This year's event is centered around the theme of music, highlighting how sound and storytelling combine to create powerful cinematic experiences. The Korean Film Festival is back for its ninth edition, with screenings set to take place at Manarat Al Saadiyat in Abu Dhabi and the Mohammed Bin Rashid Library in Dubai. This year's festival places a spotlight on music, exploring how sound and storytelling come together to create emotionally powerful cinematic experiences. Alongside the curated selection of Korean films, audiences will also enjoy two special K-Movie OST (Original Soundtrack) live concerts, featuring reimagined music from some of South Korea's most iconic films. The festival's opening film is Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, the Oscar-winning Best Picture that follows a poor family as they cunningly embed themselves into the lives of a wealthy household. Other highlights include C'est Si Bon, a romantic drama set in the 1960s Seoul music scene; Secret: Untold Melody, a psychological thriller directed by Seo You-min; My Beautiful Girl, Mari, a coming-of-age animated fantasy; and Jaurim, The Wonderland, a documentary celebrating the legacy of South Korean rock band Jaurim, with a special Q&A session with the director in Abu Dhabi. Audiences will also see Dog Days, an ensemble film about human-dog relationships in Seoul, and A Tale of Two Sisters, a psychological horror steeped in Korean folklore. The festival will close with The Host, Bong Joon-ho's monster movie classic about a mutated creature that terrorizes Seoul. As part of the festival's emphasis on cultural exchange and regional collaboration, a special screening of six Arab Film Studio titles will take place on Saturday in Abu Dhabi. This segment, presented in partnership with the Creative Media Authority, includes Sound of Memories by Gargi Chakrabarti, The First Note by Laith AlRamahi, and I See a Woman by Laura Saab. Adding a unique musical dimension to the event, the Choi Yeowan Group will headline two OST concerts in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Known for blending traditional Korean vocal styles with contemporary sounds, the ensemble will perform new interpretations of film music from classics like Parasite, My Sassy Girl, 200 Pounds Beauty and The Host. Lee Yong-hee, director of the Korean Cultural Centre in the UAE, expressed pride in the festival's continued evolution, noting its expanded programming and deeper engagement with local audiences. 'This year, we are proud to expand that engagement even further, by introducing a special Arab film showcase and hosting live K-Movie OST concerts for the first time. These additions reflect our commitment to deeper cultural exchange and creating shared experiences through film and music,' he said.
