David Joseph Wrisley

If you have a moment during WIDH 2024 and would like to experience some art, you have the opportunity to see the ongoing exhibition at the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, Horizon.

In Horizon, sculptor Blane De St. Croix unveils a series of new works rooted in his study of landscapes in the UAE. An artist-researcher, St. Croix works on site, together with scientific researchers, to develop art that is in direct response to the land itself.

More on the exhibition here. The Art Gallery can be accessed from the main road in front of campus.

The exhibition was previously closing 14 January, but has been extended until 20 January.

If you haven’t had the chance to visit the Louvre Abu Dhabi yet, it is well worth the visit! And it is quite close to NYUAD’s campus.

The regular collections feature both the permanent collection and rotating items from French museums. At the time of the WIDH2024 there are two exhibitions well worth seeing.

Closing on 14 January 2024 one day before we begin WIDH 2024, is the Letters of Light exhibition, featuring beautiful manuscripts of sacred texts from the monotheistic religions. If you like pre-modern manuscripts, this shouldn’t be missed! A podcast about Letters of Light can be found here.

A second knock-out exhibition is Cartier, Islamic Inspiration and Modern Design, featuring over 400 works including jewellery and precious objects, masterpieces of Islamic art, drawings, textiles and photographs. The exhibition showcases the influences of the Islamic arts on Cartier’s designs, from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day. And since this is the Winter Institute in Digital Humanities, don’t miss the digital projections one floor down from the exhibition!

If you are around on Friday after the WIDH2024, an informal, self-host excursion to the Louvre Abu Dhabi is planned. Your entrance ticket includes the two exhibitions.

The NYUAD Art Gallery’s new multimedia installation, Amar Kanwar’s The Sovereign Forest opens 22 January 2020, the last day of the Winter Institute in Digital Humanities. The gallery opening takes place at 6pm.

The Sovereign Forest at The NYUAD Art Gallery is an ongoing multimedia installation that is a creative response to crime, politics, human rights, and ecological crisis. It evolved out of the political and environmental conflict in the resource-rich, and largely tribal Indian state of Odisha. Kanwar has been observing and documenting the industrial interventions that have irrevocably altered Odisha’s landscape for more than a decade. The Sovereign Forest is a long-term commitment of the artist with media activist Sudhir Pattnaik, and designer and filmmaker Sherna Dastur.

The Sovereign Forest is inspired by a search for the possible answers to the following questions: How to understand crime and the conflict around us? Who defines evidence? Can “poetry” be used as “evidence” in a trial? How do we see, know, understand, and remember disappearances? How to look again?

Multiple works make up The Sovereign Forest, which has appeared in different iterations. At its core are two films: The Scene of the Crime (2011), a film that documents landscapes selected for industrial development prior to their obliteration, and A Love Story (2010), about the experience of that loss. The installation will include three large handmade books, The Counting Sisters and Other Stories (2011), The Prediction (1991–2012), and The Constitution (2012) with their own films projected on its pages. Containing local fables, stories of the incarcerated, and pieces of “evidence” such as a fishing net, a cloth garment, rice seeds, a betel leaf, and newspaper embedded inside the paper, visitors are encouraged to turn the pages and read these stories. In an adjacent gallery, an edition of The Listening Bench (2013) will also be presented, where visitors can hear an audio track from the project. In many ways, The Sovereign Forest expands upon a theme that has become central to The NYUAD Art Gallery’s program offering: that of landscape as a frame for reflection and examination of where we are, both culturally and physically.

See the Art Gallery’s page for more information.