Isola Space in Dubai is hosting Blue Gold, an exhibition curated by Jad Karam. Open until 28 March 2026, it features a group of creatives whose practices intersect with environmental awareness, craft, and material experimentation. The show reflects on water not merely as a resource but as a living force, one that shapes landscapes, cultures, and everyday practices across the Middle East.
The title refers to the increasingly precious status of water in contemporary ecological discourse. Within the exhibition, water becomes a conceptual and material thread connecting the art pieces. It appears as memory, as process, and as a transformative element capable of reshaping both land and human habitation. Through diverse works, the participating artists explore cycles of erosion, cultivation, and regeneration, revealing the often-overlooked ways in which water continues to structure the environments we inhabit.
Among the featured creatives are Jordanian-Palestinian architect and artist Abeer Seikaly; artist and designer Abdulla Buhijji; and Egyptian multidisciplinary artist Hana El-Sagini. Seikaly, whose practice lies at the intersection of architecture, design, and social practice, draws on indigenous knowledge systems and traditional craft (particularly Bedouin textile weaving) to explore sustainable structures and communal living systems.
Abdulla Buhijji’s work, which merges graphic abstraction with architectural thinking, engages with questions of identity and place through dynamic compositions and sculptural forms inspired by urban and cultural landscapes. Meanwhile, Hana El-Sagini delves into themes of memory, trauma, and loss, often focusing on the quiet narratives embedded in everyday spaces and objects.
The exhibition also presents works by Qatari artist and designer Abdulrahman AlMuftah, whose practice centres on experimental material research and the preservation of cultural heritage, and Saudi artist and designer Shaima Shamsi, who investigates identities shaped by movement across cultures and geographies.
Jordanian multidisciplinary artist Raya Kassisieh draws on her Palestinian heritage and background in textiles and pattern-making to examine the politics of the body and systems of representation. Syrian artist Talin Hazbar, who works across architecture, art, and design, grounds her practice in the materiality of landscapes and the complex relationships between environment and form. Alla Abdunabi, a UAE-based artist of Libyan heritage, explores the afterlives of objects, using materials as carriers of memory, history, and personal narrative. Her work reflects on displacement, identity, and the shifting meanings that objects acquire across geographies and time.
Further contributions come from Palestinian textile artist and designer Areen Hassan, who reinterprets the Levantine tradition of embroidery through contemporary technologies and multimedia processes, exploring transparency and reversing the conventional function of textile materials. The show also features works by 200Grs., a Lebanese design studio founded by Pascal Hachem and Rana Haddad, whose practice reconsiders local craft traditions through experimental material processes and technological innovation.
All in all, Blue Gold invites visitors to pause and observe subtle material transformations. By foregrounding processes such as weaving, layering, and sculpting natural materials, the exhibition situates contemporary artistic production within broader ecological systems, highlighting the delicate balance between natural resources and human intervention.
To learn more about Blue Gold, please visit its official web page.
You might be interested in viewing Of Land and Water: Works from the SAF Collection. We would also recommend that you read our article about three notable female designers from the Middle East.
