A Day in Abu Dhabi

10AM

NYUAD Art Gallery "The Only Constant”

In this exhibition, artists confront our contemporary landscape, with a focus on the moment where humans change landscape, and landscape changes humans, moving from images related to paradise, and progressing to ideas of development and technological aspiration.This exhibition is part of an ongoing series in which curator Maya Allison investigates the concept of landscape as it manifests in contemporary art practice, globally. 

She writes: “We humans have a complicated relationship to our landscape, particularly in an era of catastrophic climate events, and our ever-growing need for energy. My thinking for our spring exhibition, the only constant, began with Tarek Al-Ghoussein’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 and murals of nature and paradise. Each of the artists in this exhibition speak to different aspects of 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 to our own habitat.”

Curated by Maya Allison

12PM

Members to Members with Gisele Qayaleh

Gisele started her interest in art from the close friendship her mother had with her compatriot and childhood friend Juliana Seraphim. Gisele loved Juliana’s surrealism manifested in the world she created where magical architecture, mystical flowers and sensual portrayal of the female body blended in perfect harmony. 

Gisele worked at the Economics Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the UAE and played a big role in establishing the AUB Alumni Association in Abu Dhabi  supporting its various committees and promoting its fund raising activities.