Spring and fall 2023 exhibitions: contemporary landscape

Curated by Maya Allison.

The NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Art Gallery has unveiled its program for the year ahead, with two exhibitions that explore human-landscape relations as they manifest in contemporary art practice.  

The Executive Director of The NYUAD Art Gallery and University Chief Curator, Maya Allison, said: “We humans have a complicated relationship to our landscape, particularly in an era of catastrophic climate events, and our ever-growing need for energy. Both exhibitions in our main gallery this year continue my curatorial exploration of this ripe and active subject in contemporary art today. My thinking for our spring exhibition, the only constant, began with Tarek Al-Goussein’s Al Sawaber photo series from 2017, in which he captures the tension between a decaying sci-fi housing complex architecture, and its residents’ posters of a lost natural paradise. Alongside his project, I’ve selected a series of works in a range of media that speak to our fantasies and terrors around landscape: as refuge and paradise, as sustenance, as property, as energy source, as a threat, and as a register of our threat.” 

Running from February 22 to June 4, the spring exhibition, the only constant, will include works by Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Patty Chang, Gil Heitor Cortesão, Sharon Lockhart, Taus Makhacheva, Haroon Mirza, Clifford Ross, Thomas Struth, and Vivek Vilasini.

An opening reception will be held on Wednesday, February 22, with the exhibition running from Tuesday through Sunday, 12–8pm. For more details and to sign up for invitations, visit here. 

Allison continued, “Then, this fall, the artist Blane De St. Croix will open a solo exhibition, for which he is developing new work that continues his dialogues with scientists, and considers the relationship of our desert to the arctic. His large-scale installations and artworks envision landscape through the lens of climate change. This exhibition follows on a recent tour-de-force of De St. Croix’s work at MASS MoCA in the US, titled How to Move a Landscape. His method involves extended periods of research and exploration in places such as the Arctic Circle and the Gobi Desert. It’s my hope that both exhibitions will be a place for reflection and dialogue that links to the larger context of 2023 as the UAE’s Year of Sustainability, as our country prepares to host COP28.”