Abu Dhabi-based 421 announces recipients of its annual arts capacity building program

Abu Dhabi’s independent platform 421, dedicated to supporting emerging creative practitioners, has announces the recipients of its capacity building programs for the year 2023-24.

The programs, which include the Curatorial Development Program, the Artistic Research Grant, and Homebound Residency, will give 15 artists and collectives from across the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia special grants, financial resources, and professional support to work on the development of new research projects that explore critical issues related to human engagement with the environment.

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The recipients include Lina Ramadan, Paribartana Mohanty, and Ritika Biswas for its Curatorial Development Program 2023, and Yasamin Ghalehnoie, Aarti Sunder, Pak Khawateen Painting Club, Lujaine Rizk and Asim Waqif, and Lantian Xie for the Artistic Research Grantees 2023-24.

For the Homebound Residency Program 2023, the artists include Salem AlSuwaidi, Yara Al Asmar, Roger Mokbel, Walid Al Wawi, Chahine Fellahi, and Kais Aiouch (Kimia Collective), Pratyush Pushkar, and Riya Raagini (Bariya)

The 421 capacity building programs support artists and creative practitioners who have a sustained artistic practice or interest in creative disciplines. Often involving juries made up of locally and regionally based arts professionals, as well as pedagogical partners that contribute to the curricula, the capacity building programs function as a launching pad for the career development of young and emerging practitioners. Those programs are open to participation of students, recent graduates, and early-career practitioners interested in visual arts, design and architecture, film, new media, literary arts, and performance.

“We are pleased to support the work of the 15 artists and collectives from across the region who are exploring important curatorial research and artistic projects that focus on ecology, natural resources, rural communities, social evolution, and environmental change,” said Faisal Al Hassan, Head of 421. “The Curatorial Development Program, Artistic Research Grant, and the Homebound Residency Program are three of four capacity building programs that we run throughout the year at 421. These programs are designed to further our mission of supporting emerging cultural and creative practitioners and to provide them with the platform and tools to explore critical issues that are relevant to our communities and our region at large.”

He added: “While we look forward to the outcomes of these projects, we are excited by the prospect of supporting this group of artists, curators, researchers, and practitioners through a process of experimentation and learning.”

Curatorial Development Program

The Curatorial Development Program emphasizes the professional and creative development of emerging and early-career curators. Supported by the 421 team and an expert pedagogical partner, the program supports emerging local and regional curators who are given the space to hone their practice holistically and to build a well-rounded skill-set that aids them in crafting each facet of a successful exhibition.
The program features a hybrid of practical and theoretical pedagogical structure that pushes for the understanding of spatial and operational decisions not as secondary to the exhibition’s curatorial concepts, but rather as equally essential to the exhibition’s content, a reflection of and a tool for the curatorial premise to be further explored.

Lina Ramadan, Ritika Biswas, and Paribartana Mohanty were selected as participants in the 2023 iteration of the Curatorial Development Program. Organized in partnership with the Bombay Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR), the Curatorial Development Program provides curators with mentorship, guidance, and support to advance their careers and produce major curatorial and/or research projects. Their participation in this cycle of the program will culminate in two major group exhibitions and a publication that will be presented as part of 421’s Fall 2023 Program.

Ritika Biswas will curate a group exhibition which produces encounters with human and non-human extinctions. This exhibition incorporates works from emerging and established artists, writers, poets, thinkers, filmmakers, activists, and researchers from East, South, and Southeast Asia and the Middle East, as well as from other geo-social spaces, who inhabit and interrogate various forms of anxiety and excess emerging from climate and its related crises, in their practices across diverse media, including multi-channel video, soundscapes, and multi-media installation.

Paribartana Mohanty will curate a group exhibition which is a constellation of propositions, speculations, and readings about the present climate crisis, where artists and practitioners from the ‘Global South’ respond to their immediate sociocultural, political, and environmental challenges. The curator wants to navigate these intensities through interactive works that engage Abu Dhabi audiences beyond witnessing to initiate conversations.

Lina Ramadan will edit and produce a curatorial publication that is based on her research on Bayan al-Madrasa al-Kristaliyya, (The Crystal Manifesto), which is a declaration published by the Crystalist School in 1976 in Khartoum, Sudan, by a group comprised of artists Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq, Muhammad Hamid Shaddad, Naiyla al-Tayib, Hisham Abdallah, and Hashim Ibrahim, delivering aesthetic and philosophy commentary on themes such as time, knowledge, the measurement of space, language, and critiques modes of art-making within growing “universal” discourse.

Ramadan’s publication will present artistic interventions and essays by early-career and emerging artists and researchers from MENSA region, and beyond who critically use image-making and text as means to understand possible ways of understanding ecological change. The experimental book aims to reflect on contemporary artistic tendencies and put notions such as land knowledge, environmental degradation, madness, and apocalypse(s) in dialogue. The contributors will take the Crystalist Manifesto as a point of departure and extend beyond it to examine how they articulate subjects related to Anthropocene.

Artistic Research Grant 2023-24

The Artistic Research Grant fosters practice-based research that investigates contemporary social questions through interdisciplinary methodologies and active engagement with the researcher’s community. Open to local and regional early-to-mid career creative practitioners, the program gives grantees the opportunity to focus on the research process and encourages them to experiment with new research methods. The program is designed to promote exploration, experimentation, and wider dissemination of knowledge within the arts community.

Yasamin Ghalehnoie, Aarti Sunder, Lujaine Rizk, Asim Waqif, and Pak Khawateen Painting Club, and Lantian Xie, were selected for the grant, which will culminate in a series of publications that present each recipients’ research findings and process. Together, the artists will be exploring the following themes: ecological issues, rural communities, environmental change, social evolution, traditional crafts, ecology, natural resources, and human engagement with the environment. The Artistic Research Grant projects will be presented in a series of artist books that will be published in 2024 and that will focus on the processes and outcomes resulting from the grant.

Homebound Residency Program 2023

421’s Homebound Residency Program supports creative practitioners to produce new works and explore community engagement in their practices while working remotely. The six-month-long online residency challenges creative practitioners to think deeply about connection, communication, and multidimensional interaction with each other and their communities, as well as the various ways in which we reside in urban spaces and the digital realm.

Salem AlSuwaidi, Yara Al Asmar, Roger Mokbel, Walid Al Wawi, Chahine Fellahi and Kais Aiouch (Kimia Collective), and Pratyush Pushkar and Riya Raagini (Bariya) were selected as participants in the program. Sara bint Safwan, the inaugural recipient of the Curatorial Development Program in 2020, is the interlocutor of this year’s Homebound Residency, and will support the artists throughout the program in the development of their projects.

Read more:

421’s exciting spring 2023 program features Nasir Nasrallah’s Poetics of the Machine

Ammar al-Attar’s ‘Out of Range’ contemplates the ‘performance’ of work

Jill Magi and ‘The Weft in Pencil’: Story of words, printed page, and textiles