COLLECTION: Negative SPACE

April 5th - 11th, 2025

Villa 72, Al Fanna St., Umm Suqeim 3, Dubai

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Please email engage@101.art for inquiries

Negative S P A C E is a group exhibition curated by Nadine Khoury and Gaith Abdulla that examines the resilience and resourcefulness of artists working outside the confines of institutional representation. The exhibition brings together a diverse group of artists navigating the scarcity of creative spaces and questioning the structures that shape access, inclusion, and artistic agency. Negative S P A C E is the outcome of Engage101’s third Peer Review Program, an artist development initiative seen as a collaborative effort between Engage101 and the participating artists centered around discussion and critique between peers.

The participating artists: Ahed Al Kathiri, Ahed Alameri, Alina El Assadi, Amna Ilyas, Fizza Shabbir, Layla Doueidi and architect collective Salma Hani Ali & Omar AlAhmadani, reflect on how space is claimed, contested, and reimagined.

At the heart of Negative S P A C E lies a series of critical inquiries: 

How do we want our spaces to exist?

How can we reshape the space we occupy?

How do we claim our space?

How are we unknowingly conforming to societal spaces?

In what ways can we draw inspiration from past generations to create alternative spaces?

Who speaks for us?

Who are ‘we’?

As the UAE experiences a growing rise in independent art collectives and alternative spaces, Negative S P A C E seeks to examine the driving forces behind these movements while drawing inspiration from the legacies of past grassroots initiatives, such as the Emirates Fine Arts Society (Sharjah), Bait 15 (Abu Dhabi), and The Flying House (Dubai).

Negative S P A C E draws audiences into the possibilities that emerge when boundaries are stretched or broken entirely. It is an exhibition about agency, resistance, and redefining creative autonomy in the face of limitations.

In her work, Ahed Al Kathiri investigates negative space through the pauses, silences, and breaths of oral language and daily speech. Using her grandmother’s voicenotes to transcribe her Radaai accent, she developed a topographic map of how phonetic sounds travel through the mouth as words are enunciated. Ahed enlists the viewer as an ally in challenging nationalist and territorial ideas of belonging by evoking ritual in exercises of sonic mimicry. Sharing a performative approach, Ahed Alameri examines authorship, ownership, and power dynamics in nationalism through an interactive performance, drawing on participatory practice and the Ship of Theseus paradox to question how socio-political narratives evolve and take shape within shared spaces. 

Taking a tactile approach, Alina El Assadi researches space, materiality, and storytelling through an experimental practice of embroidering on melon surfaces, transforming an organic material into a site of resilient expression. While Amna Ilyas’s sculptural explorations take cues from background spaces and overlooked elements that lie in the midst of our embodied experiences. Through her sculptural forms Amna redirects attention to focus on the negative rather than the positive of sensorial perception, revealing our reliance on the spatial and contextual clues by which we encode and decode meaning.

Layla Doueidi conjures memory, identity, and sensory perception through scent to reconsider essences of personhood. Inspired by personal experiences and the philosophy of olfactory perception, her work blends scent, text, and sculpture to create immersive, multi-sensory encounters. Rooted in a family legacy of perfume-making, Layla's practice challenges traditional notions of art and brings viewers to selfhood as a sensory experience and memory as space beyond vision, offering layered experiences of remembrance and connection.

As we exist in the spaces of our cities, Fizza Shabbir asks us to linger on feelings of disorientation in the hyper-modern urban landscapes of the contemporary Gulf. How loitering, pausing, and existing in spaces meant for movement challenge societal norms and expectations. Fizza looks at how people imprint on cityscapes, choreographing presence and absence, through psychogeographic practices like the dérive and flânerie—mapping cities not by direction but by feeling, resistance, and the imagination of alternative ways of being.

Further examining the materiality of our built environments, architects Salma Hani Ali & Omar AlAhmadani challenge us to rethink how we see transitional spaces or ‘thresholds’ in the architecture of hypercapitalist cities like Dubai. In their research on depersonalisation and homogeneity in contemporary architecture, Salma & Omar interrogate the dead spaces of the physical surroundings we construct and ask how they can provide cues for alternative ways of interpreting ‘space’.