Fatma Al Ali, My Mother Told Me Not to Collect Bricks, 2020
The UAE art calendar is marked by a number of events that come around once every 12 months and cumulatively build up what is rapidly becoming a rich history and community of local cultural production. Arguably one of the most anticipated moments in the calendar year is the opening of the SEAF show which takes place each fall at the Warehouse 421 gallery on the fringe of Abu Dhabi city. The Salama Bint Hamdan Emerging Arts Fellowship, colloquially known as SEAF, is now in its seventh year and its latest cohort is nothing shy of extraordinary.
The program, which runs in partnership with the world-renowned Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), provides around 15 young UAE-based artists with 10 months of artistic training and development. At the culmination of the 10 months, their works are exhibited in a group show, and the graduates have the opportunity to continue their studies in a fully-funded MA program at RISD.
This year’s cohort of 16, nurtured through their studio-based practice under 2020’s extraordinary conditions has produced a vivid and colorful reflection on the ways that artistic practice can crystallize a way of being in the world. Ruminations on architecture large and small, interior and exterior, intersect with self-reflexive corporeal pieces and practices that tease many senses. Traveling through the show one is led on an insightful journey that illustrates where the future of art might be going when led by the most talented of this young generation.
Al-Ali’s My mother told me not to collect bricks turns the heavy foundational building block of a brick into a melting, collapsing pile of brick shells made of the rubber-like urethane. Her bricks do not so much crumble but fold in on themselves, the epidermis peeling and slipping off of the gypsum blocks.