Until 7 September 2025, 421 Arts Campus is hosting Unstable Grounds, an exhibition displaying the thesis projects of eight graduating MFA students from New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). Now in its fourth year, this collaboration between 421 and NYUAD offers a platform for emerging voices whose research-driven practices engage with themes of the environment, displacement, migration, memory, and human connection.
The exhibition brings together diverse works which range from sculptures to video art pieces. They explore the origins of flora, fauna, and water as metaphors for ecological and economic cycles. The addressed themes also include memory and its role in shaping perception, as well as communion as a vulnerable and celebratory act tied to notions of belonging and community.
Although global in background, the practices of the 2025 MFA cohort are rooted in regional specificity, responding to the socio-material conditions of West Asia, its urban environments, commercial zones, and cultural histories. Through theoretical, archival, and material inquiries, this cohort continues the legacy of the programme’s investigative spirit.
About the artists
Adele Bea Cipste (b. 1998, Riga, Latvia) examines the interplay between photography, drawing, and text to capture embodied experiences of space. Her recent work reflects on personal memory and urban transformation in the UAE, probing the emotional and physical resonances of presence, absence, transience, and attachment.
Dima Abou Zannad (b. 1999, Beirut) is a UAE-based artist whose practice encompasses writing, installation, and performance. Engaging language as subject and material, she focuses on the politics of immobilisation and explores stillness as a site of constraint and resistance. Through acts of inscription and erasure, she evokes a poetics of rupture, surrender, and endurance.
Mowen Li (Amira) (b. 1991, China) is an artist and activist working primarily with painting and installation. Her socially engaged practice spans numerous countries and communities, facilitating cross-cultural dialogue and collaborative projects that focus on peace, sustainability, and shared humanity.
Bao (b. 2000, Shanxi, China) is an Abu Dhabi-based artist working across different mediums, which include printmaking, installation, and performance. Her practice that blends visual storytelling with interactive game mechanics invites audiences to become participants rather than passive observers, navigating themes of visibility, perception, and play.
Hala El Abora (b. 1999, Amman, Jordan) is a Palestinian-Jordanian artist based in the UAE whose practice draws from archives, archaeology, and material histories. She employs photography, print, sculpture, and digital mediums to explore how landscapes hold and transmit knowledge, challenging the passive status of archives and terrains as just repositories.
In her multidisciplinary work, artist and architect Jude Maharmeh (b. 2000) interrogates abstraction through form, material, and light. Drawing on architectural language, her art pieces explore the subtle interactions between built environments and aesthetic experience.
Emirati artist Safeya Sharif (b. 1999, Dubai) delves into spatial relationships and abstraction, using unconventional materials like linoleum cutouts and metal structures. Her art is deeply personal, reflecting on memory, voids, depth, and internal landscapes.
Danutė Vaitekūnaitė (b. 1998, Šiauliai, Lithuania), a visual artist and writer residing in the UAE, combines painting, sculpture, found objects, and writing to produce storytelling performances and installations. Attuned to the overlooked and mundane, her practice explores the quiet tension between people, objects, and their spatial environments.
To get more information about Unstable Grounds, please visit the official web page of the exhibition.
You might also be interested in visiting Between Metamorphosis and Reality by Maitha Abdalla and Elysian Awakening of Powerful Spring.
To stay connected with the latest art news, consider joining our Telegram channel.
