Intersections marks the beginning of the gallery's 2025 program in Abu Dhabi, UAE, presenting artists from the gallery's program alongside artists from the United Arab Emirates curated by Mohammed Al Saqqa
Intersections: Expanded Limits and Crossing Boundaries
Art has long served as a space of convergence—where histories, traditions, and creative processes intersect to expand the limits of perception and meaning. Intersections is an investigation into transcultural dialogues in contemporary art, tracing how artists challenge established frameworks while forging new connections between material, technique, and conceptual inquiry.
Marking the inaugural collaboration between O-Contemporary and Baró Galeria, this exhibition unites internationally acclaimed artists with leading and emerging artists from the Middle East. Featured artists include Joana Vasconcelos, Gary Hill, Mohammed Kazem, Rasheed Araeen, Zainab Al Hashmi, AVAF, Elias Crespín, Abdus Salaam, Afra Al Suwaidi, and Christopher Benton. Their works—spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, textile-based practices, and video—demonstrate a wide range of artistic approaches, emphasizing the fluidity of artistic exchange.
At its essence, Intersections reflects on how contemporary art functions beyond singular narratives, embracing the interwoven nature of artistic heritage and global influence. The exhibition challenges the rigidity of conventional mediums, positioning artistic practice as a site of experimentation where form, history, and meaning continuously shift.
Joana Vasconcelos recontextualizes crochet within contemporary painting, subverting traditional hierarchies between craft and fine art. By layering handwoven textiles over surfaces, she creates textured, sculptural compositions that blend personal and collective histories, blurring the lines between the domestic and the monumental. This engagement with materiality finds resonance in Zainab Al Hashmi’s Dialogue with Nature (2024), a work installed outdoors, allowing rain to imprint its mark on the fabric, symbolizing the interplay between humanity and the natural world.
Gary Hill’s Place Holder transforms the act of flipping a coin into a meditation on chance, repetition, and sound, dissolving boundaries between performance, moving image, and conceptual inquiry. This emphasis on process and gesture aligns with Mohammed Kazem’s Kisses series, where chalk lines drawn between old, blackened chewing gum on sidewalks transform mundane urban elements into visual compositions, highlighting hidden narratives of movement, presence, and memory.
Rasheed Araeen approaches painting as an intellectual and mathematical exploration, extending abstraction beyond aesthetics to engage with logic, infinity, and symmetry. His structured, methodical approach finds parallels in the kinetic sculptures of Elias Crespín, whose suspended works generate movement and transformation in space, challenging the viewer’s perception of stability and fluidity.
Abdus Salaam’s Mother, Child, Earth, a marble sculpture exploring filial piety, reflects on intergenerational relationships by depicting a parental figure suspended above the earth by the presence of a child. The work embodies universal principles of respect and responsibility, echoed across sacred texts from the Quran, Torah, and New Testament. In contrast, Afra Al Suwaidi’s The Last State of Humanity (2023) envisions a future where artificial materials supplant organic existence. While Salaam carves enduring traditions into stone, Al Suwaidi constructs her vision from ABS plastic, highlighting the fragile balance between natural and synthetic realities.
Through these varied approaches, Intersections highlights the expanded potential of artistic mediums as a means of exploring temporality, materiality, and cultural hybridity. The exhibition serves as a metaphor for the collaboration between O-Contemporary and Baró Galeria, reinforcing the Middle East’s growing role as a vital center for contemporary artistic exchange, where global perspectives converge to create new possibilities.
Mohammed Al Saqqa
