Coming up at XVA Gallery – “Moving Art”, a group exhibition featuring works from South Africa to the Middle East.

Join us from September 7th – October 19th, 2023 to experience a tale of movement through
line and medium. An insight into how art comes alive.

Curatorial statement:

The use of line has always been the constant within art. Whether it be employed as the protagonist of the work or the tool used to uncover the subject matter, lines have been an ever
present element, dictating the depths and layers of a composition. “Moving Art” examines what it means to create a dynamic work of art and capture a movement. How does an artwork
come to life? How does it capture the audience’s attention and carry it through the work to tell a story?

By creating a visual journey, this exhibition investigates the relation between subject matter
and medium. A union of tactile and visual stimuli ranging from figurative to abstract all to showcase the extent to which movement can be captured and portrayed.

About the artist:

Richard Ketley
Is a South African artist based in Dubai and Johannesburg. He has a Masters in Fine Art degree from the University of the Witwatersrand. His work centers on his global travels and experience of place and culture that he captures in abstract works executed in a diverse range of media.

I find meaning where others do not – in the fall of light on a sandy building in Riyadh, the chaos of the shacks of Kampala, the crowded taxi parks of Johannesburg. I travel widely in the Middle East and Africa, and am inspired by these places of contemporary significance.

Halim Al Karim
With photography as his chosen medium, the artist chooses to depict his experiences using conceptually expressive imagery, continuing with his experimental practice. Innovations in digitization allowed Al Karim to further develop his illusionary technique and extend the use of the medium. The impact of wars and the related pursuit of truth and humanity remained the central focus of the artist’s work.

Yoshihiko Tsutsumi
Born in Kumamoto. After graduating from the department of design of college in Tokyo, dealt with many works of graphic design, logo marks and art painting as a designer and artist for many entertainment companies such as discotheques, clubs and live houses at metropolitan areas like Roppongi, Shinjuku and Shibuya in Tokyo.

Drawings with white pencil over a black painted canvas, or to its contrary, drawings with a graphite pencil over white surface: these monochromatic and two-dimensioned series of works can be classified as an art that leaves out “traces” of the sequence of “actions” of over-layering the dots. This series of works that at first impression seem abstract, reflect an architectural process in which
elements are plotted and then constructed.

Mahmoud Hamadani
His works have been shown at The British Museum, The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, as well as numerous solo and group exhibitions in New York, London, Dubai, Lausanne, Beirut and Hong Kong. He is in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The British Museum. He is a recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant.

Hamadani earned a BA in Mathematics from State University of New York and a Masters degree in Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Barbara Wildenboer
Her work mostly consists of collage, photo/paper-construction, and digitally animated photographic sculpture. She uses a combination of analogue and digital processes to create work which explores different phenomena such as temporality, fractal geometry, and the interconnectedness of all living things. Wildenboer exposes the connections between a myriad of life forms: from the microscopic to the immense. Her main focus is on environmental aesthetics, seeing this as something that not only encompasses natural territories, but also extends to human interaction within the natural realm.

Imran Channa
Is a Pakistani visual artist. He studied BFA (Painting) and MA(Hons) in Visual Arts from the National College of Arts Lahore in 2004 and 2008. Channa’s primary interest is in historical documentation and how that documentation creates narratives, information and misinformation. He finds that historical narratives and the documents that create or support them are limited in scope and complexity. He uses drawing, moving image, installation and digital technology as means to re-examine historical documents and their influence, inviting audiences to contemplate the
contradictions of how we record and understand history.

Oussama Garti
Born in Rabat, is a Moroccan architectural designer and artist trained at the Architectural Association in London. Fascinated by the infinite amount of similarities between macro and micro elements around him, Garti explores the idea of perception and works with extensive research to produce his work.

His latest body of work, “Ripples” came after a series of small studies exploring the strong interrelation between emotions and movement. He then questions the abstract spaces generated with every motion and chain reaction that comes after it as he stretches fabric on top of his canvas before freezing it.

Jacob Roepke
“When looking at Jakob Roepke’s abstract reliefs I can let my eyes wander here and there over the coherent geometric shapes, exploring paths up and down something that could be a geological
structure, meandering through something that could be a hilly landscape, overlapping rooftops or some sort of crystalized physiognomy. Apart from all these random associations, still I a m not confined by any narrowing attributions but can still just appreciate these wall objects like an intricate image. Curiously the artist, in his creative process, has confined himself by using only a limited set of shapes, mainly triangles and squares, but thus creating a great variation of shapes and shades. The shades of gray display a two-dimensional mosaic-like image which is produced via a three-dimensional construction. Depending on angle and intensity of light, this picture is ever changing, a bright lit shape can turn into dark gray when placed in the shadow by a changing
illumination, offering us a variety of aesthetic experiences by using minimalist means.”

Merle Eisenberg, 2018

About XVA Gallery

XVA Gallery is one of the leading galleries in the Middle East that specializes in contemporary art from the Arab world, Iran, and the Subcontinent. Exhibitions focus on works by the region’s foremost artists as well as those emerging onto the scene. The gallery’s artists express their different cultural identities and perspectives while challenging the viewer to drop prejudices and borders. XVA Gallery and XVA Art Hotel are located in Dubai’s heritage district, now called Al Fahidi Historical Neighborhood. XVA founded and organized the Bastakiya Art Fair from 2007- 2010 as part of its commitment to raising the profile of contemporary art practice in Dubai.