Abu Dhabi: The NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Art Gallery’s auxiliary venue, the Project Space, has announced its first 2024 exhibition, Being Borrowed: On Egyptian Migration to the Gulf.

Being Borrowed opens on Thursday, January 11, with a public reception at 5:30pm. The exhibition,  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.

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.

This project is funded by the NYUAD Arts and Humanities Research Kitchen Al Mashhad. An initiative of the NYUAD Arts and Humanities Division, Research Kitchens are thematic hubs for building communities of researchers across disciplinary boundaries. Al Mashhad roughly translates to The Scene, giving emphasis to place not only in its geographical sense, but also in its social, cultural, and artistic dimensions. The kitchen fosters research that engages substantially with Abu Dhabi, the UAE, and the region.

Located in The Arts Center and supported by the museum staff of the NYUAD Art Gallery, the Project Space is a non-commercial gallery dedicated to Abu Dhabi community projects. The Project Space gives priority to exhibitions from within the academic and regional community, including the annual Senior Capstone Festival, faculty-curated exhibitions, experimental projects, and the work of emerging artists from the region. 

  • Exhibition title: Being Borrowed: On Egyptian Migration to the Gulf 
  • Exhibition dates: January 11 to February 7, Tuesday through Sunday, 12-8 pm. Closed on Mondays.
  • Admission: Free 
  • Exhibition page: Click here for more details.

About the curators

Farah Hallaba

Farah Hallaba obtained her MA in Social Anthropology and Visual Ethnography from the University of Kent. She started @anthropology_bel3araby انثروبولوجي بالعربي in 2019, aiming to publicize anthropology in an accessible way and in Arabic. She has been doing short engaging online videos and workshops since then.These are mainly visual anthropology and collaborative anthropology workshops about social class and migration to the Gulf, which in turn gave way to the “Being Borrowed” multi-media exhibition and publication in 2022. Hallaba was a resident teaching fellow at CILAS (Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences), where she taught Ethnographic Studies in 2021-2022. She shares a creative space in downtown Cairo, where she collaborates with artists to offer spaces for creative discussion-based knowledge production.

Farida Youssef

Farida Youssef is a critic and curator based in Cairo. She received an MA in European Philosophy from University College London. She is interested in the value of spatial theory for artistic inquiries. In 2018, she was a Meerut Fellow at the British Museum, where she researched the Egyptian collection through the lens of contemporary philosophy. In 2021-2022, she was a residential fellow at CILAS, where she developed a project on stupidity as a tool to observe critical and creative thinking. Last year, she curated the “Being Borrowed” exhibition with Anthropology bel Arabi, hosted by the CIC. Recently, her proposal was selected through apexart’s International Open Call in 2023 to be exhibited this fall. As a writer, she has published academic chapters, articles, and exhibition catalogues on twentieth and contemporary visual culture.

Laure Assaf

Laure Assaf is an Assistant Professor of Arab Crossroads Studies, Anthropology, and Social Research and Public Policy at New York University Abu Dhabi. She was trained in anthropology at Paris Nanterre University and in Arabic at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO). Her research interests focus on youth, urbanity, and migration in the contemporary Emirati society and the broader Gulf region.

About the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery 

www.nyuad-artgallery.org 

Established in 2014, the NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Art Gallery is the Gulf’s first of its kind, and among the only university galleries in the region with a program of scholarly and experimental museum exhibitions. Supporting the progress made by other arts institutions within the UAE, the NYUAD Art Gallery and the projects it supports serve the local arts community as a testing ground for new and innovative curatorial approaches that nourish the dialogue around exhibition practice in the Gulf. The program is recognized for mapping new territories and ideas, presenting exhibitions by internationally established artists, curators, and scholars. A regular book publication program is a core part of its curatorial frame within its academic mission. In addition, its auxiliary venue, the Project Space is an exhibition laboratory for UAE-based artists and curators. Situated within NYU Abu Dhabi, the community of which hails from over 125 countries, the Art Gallery, the Project Space, and the Art Gallery's Reading Room collectively open up artistic opportunities and initiate regional and global dialogue. 

About NYU Abu Dhabi 

https://nyuad.nyu.edu/en/ 

NYU Abu Dhabi is the first comprehensive liberal arts and research campus in the Middle East to be operated abroad by a major American research university. NYU Abu Dhabi has integrated a highly selective program with majors in the sciences, engineering, social sciences, arts, and humanities with a world center for advanced research. Its campus enables students to succeed in an increasingly interdependent world, and to advance cooperation and progress on humanity’s shared challenges. NYU Abu Dhabi’s high-achieving students have come from over 125 countries and speak over 100 languages. Together, NYU's campuses in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai form the backbone of a unique global university, giving faculty and students opportunities to experience varied learning environments and immersion in other cultures at one or more of the numerous study-abroad sites NYU maintains on six continents.