LUX in Dhalaam
Laura Xenopol, Khalid Al Amimi, Metha Naser, Sara Almaazmi, and Yoonsik Chico Park
Five artists entered Dhalaam. They brought notes, tools, jokes, rituals, and mistakes.
Laura Xenopol (b. 1999, Romania) is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher living and working in Abu Dhabi. Her work features an evolving system of symbols that emerge through an intuitive, automatic process, manifesting in paintings, drawings, and site-specific installations. Xenopol investigates her own mental process, which she likens to an aperture that adjusts to allow new perceptions of the unseen. Xenopol’s research bridges archaeological references, personal experience, and a holistic understanding of knowledge to shape a space for contemplation.
Khalid Al Amimi (b. 1996) is a Dubai-based artist-writer whose work explores masculinity, memory, and cultural inheritance. Featured in The Boys Are Alright (2025) at Bayt Al Mamzar—and profiled by GQ Middle East, The Sandy Times, and Canvas Magazine—he is now dipping his toe into contemporary art, expanding his practice beyond writing into performance and image-making. He also appears in Talal Al Najjar’s video projects, blending text, body, and narrative gestures.
Metha Naser Alsaeedi (b. 1998, UAE) is a poet and curator based in Abu Dhabi. She is the founder and creative director of Nathir Arts (نَثْر للفنون), an Abu Dhabi consultancy and creative platform working at the intersections of language, art, and futures thinking. Through Nathir, she leads projects that blend curatorial research, literary inquiry, and technology. Writing under the pen name نَثْر (Nathir), Metha explores Nabati, Classical Arabic, and prose poetry, alongside short fiction and dramaturgical texts that bridge heritage with contemporary thought.
Sara Almaazmi (b. 1999, UAE) is a visual artist whose practice explores the sacred qualities of beauty through the human experience. And the act of witnessing across lived, relational, and metaphysical states. With a background in engineering and visual art, she works across painting and stained glass, centering the motif of the sun. In Almaazmi’s philosophy, the sun acts as a symbol of the eternal witness to human existence. Through this motif, her work channels the sublime, resulting in contemplations of beauty, balance, and infinity that merges her love of light and color.
Yoonsik Chico Park (b. 1998, Seoul) is an artist working across performance, installation, sculpture, and image. His practice examines individual agency and various tensions in human experience to explore how we could craft a more meaningful existence. Utilizing everyday spaces, found objects, ritual, and gesture, his works play on opposites and scale, often presented as site-specific stagings or scenarios responding to personal and current affairs.
LUX in Dhalaam
LUX in Dhalaam.لوكس في الظلام brings together five UAE-based artists who have treated the long, narrow gallery like a portal. Dhalaam, derived from the Arabic ظلام meaning shadow or darkness, is imagined as a parallel realm where light miscommunicates: it bends, listens, gets the message wrong, then tries again.
Each artwork functions as an artifact of translation: a residue from attempts to render the unseen into form. The narrow gallery space has been transformed into a threshold where matter, symbol, and meaning converge, creating a space for "deep knowledge." Deep knowledge, within the framework of Dhalaam, is a living repository encompassing ancestral creative practices, repetition, lived experiences, and the subconscious. It is rooted in the collective memory and passed down through each artist's lineage. Rather than presenting objects with conceptual qualities, the works serve as dynamic inquiries into ancestral embodied knowledge: a multi-generational process of sensing, feeling, and rewriting subconscious information and spiritual truths that resist direct articulation.
The resulting site-specific activation hearkens back to forms of knowledge that predate language and formal education, going back to the instinctual acts of marking cave walls or the rhythms of stories passed down around campfires. These early acts of storytelling and symbolic transcription were once warnings, guides, and repositories of wisdom, ensuring the survival and continuity of human consciousness. The exhibition positions contemporary artistic practice as a continuation of these ancient methods of encoding meaning, where symbol and intuition operate as parallel systems of intelligence.
Each artist undertakes an incursion into the realm of Dhalaam, contributing fragments, signals, and symbols that together form a provisional cartography.