What Does It Mean to Be ‘Near’? A New Exhibition Asks Us to Rethink Closeness

Ahead of Proximities, a landmark exhibition opening 15 December 2025 at the Seoul Museum of Art, presented in collaboration with the Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation, Something Curated invites curators Maya El Khalil and Eunju Kim to reflect on the ideas shaping this ambitious project. The show brings together more than 100 works by 47 artists across three generations, marking the most comprehensive presentation of contemporary art from the Arab world ever held in Korea.

A peculiar dialect – sometimes called International Art English (IAE) – colonises the tongue of those who speak about contemporary practice. The tension of who gets to speak and in what language was something that the artist Hassan Sharif – known as the “godfather of conceptual art in the Gulf” – encountered in the 1980s. As an undergraduate student in London, he was continually told he would not be able to engage with his peers if he did not do so in English. Despite (and perhaps because of) his well-documented commitment to learning, dialogue, and exchange, he rejected this idea. His photographic series Dictionary (1981) was part of this resistance, enacting translation as an active and physical process. In 2015, the series evolved into a monumental hanging sculpture where Sharif gathered seven illustrated dictionaries, both English and Arabic, including the one he used in London during his student days, and glued individual pages to cotton ropes. Assembled together, they took on the stature of a human body composed of polyglot cultural references.

We begin with Dictionary for the way in which it structures meaning as something unresolved. Inherently anti-utilitarian: it is not a book that can be leafed, it is unbound and therefore open, as per something that circulates without settling into regimented sameness. The hanging form refuses the flattening of translation-as-equivalence, promising instead languages, materials, and temporalities in relation, where each maintains its own symbolic thickness while forming something new together.

This embrace of unresolvability was the first movement behind Proximities, an exhibition of contemporary practice from the United Arab Emirates that opens December 15th at Seoul Museum of Art. To be in proximity is to be near in place, time, or relation – in as inside, or in tension. Implied is one position that comes to feel and know its shape through others – people, ideas, locations – two or more set in contrast or kinship. From the Latin proximus (nearest, next, adjoining), it is the superlative form of prope, that is, most near. Proximity cannot be anything other than a thing in relation, suggesting more than a physical or temporal state, closeness is subjective, always measured against the self – we cannot start from anywhere else. Proximity, then, is a kind of familiarity – it is both what is near to us and what we recognise as such, what we claim as adjacent to our experience, our vision, our understanding.

In today’s interconnected world, we are configured into proximities that exceed what geography can map. In the immediacy and closeness offered by globalisation, artists work with inherited forms and circulating materials. Between the regionally specific and the internationally legible, this tripartite exhibition considers how ideas evolve through movement and translation – colliding and synthesising views.

Working as curators, in collaboration with three artist-curators Farah Al Qasimi, Mohammed Kazem and Cristiana de Marchi, and the trio Ramin, Rokni, Hesam, we set out to think of our relations to a global art world – that same one which would flatten our communications into IAE – as one of perspectives forming into proximities that reject assumptions about centre and periphery. Through these three sections, each a subjective perspective and position about how we might encounter and process a world that feels closer than ever, Proximities presents more than forty artists across three generations, all connected to the United Arab Emirates, a Gulf nation that has been shaped in the convergences of migration, the abundance of natural resources, and accelerated urban transformation. The exhibition asks: what does it mean to be near to one another in the context of the accelerated closeness that globalisation gives rise to?

That there are proximities between the experiences of those who reside in Seoul and Abu Dhabi might point us towards one answer: two cities utterly transformed in one generation, skylines rising, memories formed between rapid construction and influxes of global capital. Between those two ‘worlds’ – close in ways that belie geographies and histories – proximity is the shared navigation of inherited traditions and speculative futures, art infrastructure becoming central to how each city imagines and images itself on a world stage. Yet we can also become lost within that seductive sense of surface familiarity. This is not a lament for some dubious sense of ‘authenticity’ or a call to defend borders. Instead, as methodology and theme, we wanted to interrogate how proximity produces contrary conditions – thickness and flatness, complexity and simplification. Artists are able to navigate these tensions while remaining porous to transformation.

For Proximities, we have chosen transformation over translation, encounter over explanation. The group of artist-curators all have practices that navigate questions of belonging, displacement, and cultural complexity. They were invited to propose their own perspectives on the ideas of proximities, they congregated peers who shared those stances, and together we came to collectively imagine ways to encounter the world. What emerged were three distinct positions, each anchored in a different mode of relation: fabulation as a strategy for metabolising change through domestic imagination; cartography as counter-practice, recording relationships rather than terrain; and amphibious dwelling, where artists exist simultaneously within institutions and their own practices, transforming both.

The artists drew together peers around these three perspectives, creating nodes which are not discrete categories but permeable territories. As curators, we worked in dialogue with the artists to understand their worlds, developing strands that radiated from those cores, connecting and merging the positions: some prompted in contrast, while others evolved existing themes. We think of these gravitating works as productive intervals where different approaches to cultural navigation overlap and inform one another.

If the thought behind this exhibition could be diagrammed, its shape might be like that of Sharif’s Dictionary – systems that wish to be fixed, that pretend to be codified and immutable, being remade into an organic form that refuses to settle or hold still. People and their ways of knowing the world can be thought of as a series of concentric circles radiating from multiple centres, some so close together that the lines grow thick and heavy, others distant and granted definition through gaps between. The spheres overlap, some are incomplete, stopping abruptly, interrupted by others. Each artist, each work, each curatorial intervention becomes its own locus – distinct yet inextricably involved with what surrounds it.



Feature image: Farah Al Qasimi, Goat Farm Majlis, 2021. Courtesy of the artist