Art Here 2025: Shadows at Louvre Abu Dhabi is an evocative exploration of light, absence, and the subtle power of the in-between. Organised in partnership with Richard Mille, this fifth edition of the annual Art Here initiative features artists from the GCC, Japan, and the wider MENA region with GCC ties. The exhibition invites them to create site-specific installations that respond to the museum’s architecture and the central theme of “shadows,” understood not only as visual phenomena but as conceptual spaces where memory, identity, time, and experience converge. Curated by Swiss-Japanese curator Sophie Mayuko Arni, the exhibition will remain open until 28 December 2025.
Inspired by the interplay of daylight filtering through Jean Nouvel’s spectacular dome, the show reflects on the philosophical and architectural significance of shadow in Japanese and Gulf traditions. In Japanese aesthetics, shadow and dimness carry poetic weight, celebrating nuance, quietness, and the beauty of negative space. In the Gulf, shade has long been essential to survival and social life, shaping vernacular architecture and the sensory rhythms of daily existence. Within this framework, the participating artists reinterpret shadow as a medium of reflection, concealment, transformation, and fleeting presence.
Across the exhibition, six installations translate this theme into diverse material, spatial, and emotional languages. Palestinian artist Ahmed Alaqra presents I remember. a light, an installation that turns intangible urban shadows into resin-encased memory objects (cubes), creating a sculptural archive of momentary forms from Sharjah and Dubai. Pakistani artist Hamra Abbas contributes Tree Studies, 31 lapis-inlaid stone works that evoke the silhouettes of trees. The work seamlessly merges nature, landscape, and cultural memory.
Japanese audiovisual artist and composer Ryoichi Kurokawa displays skadw-, an immersive audiovisual environment shaped by a beam of light, drifting fog, and shifting sound. This art piece transforms absence into atmospheric presence and allows viewers to feel unity with the space itself. Meanwhile, Emirati artist Jumairy delves into the psychological dimension of shadow with Echo, an interactive installation inspired by the writings of Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung. It confronts visitors with their “shadow selves,” weaving together myth, identity, and introspection.
The duo YOKOMAE et BOUAYAD, comprising Japanese architect Takuma Yokomae and Moroccan architect Dr Ghali Bouayad, offers choreography of a cloud, dancing shadows. It is a lightweight, mesh pavilion whose subtle movements and constantly changing shadows recall natural patterns. Japanese artist and poet Rintaro Fuse’s polished metal sundial aligns viewers with celestial time, casting shadows that speak to histories and futures far beyond the human scale.
Together, these works activate the museum’s architectural setting. They turned the spaces beneath the dome into a theatre of shifting light where each viewer becomes a participant in the choreography of seeing and sensing.
By foregrounding shadows, those quiet traces that shape our perception as much as light itself, Art Here 2025 offers visitors to engage deeply with the ephemeral, the unseen, and the liminal. In doing so, it transforms the act of looking into a contemplative journey through memory, space, and the poetics of transience.
To learn more about Art Here 2025: Shadows, please visit the exhibition’s official web page.
You might be also interested in viewing The Contingent Object by Shaikha Al Mazrou.
