Curating the Future: A Three-Part Public Event at NYU Abu Dhabi

Curating the Future grows out of "Future Is Not a Grave," a workshop that brings together artists and scholars to examine futurisms and futurescapes across the MENA region, the Gulf, and the Indian Ocean worlds. This three-part public program invites audiences to explore how artistic and curatorial practices imagine — and reimagine — the future.

The evening begins with a guided tour of the exhibition Ala Younis: Past of a Temporal Universe at the NYUAD Art Gallery, led by Executive Director Maya Allison and historian Masha Kirasirova, one of Younis’s collaborators and a co-convener of the "Future Is Not a Grave" workshop. The exhibition explores retro-futurism and nostalgia for past moments of optimism and aspiration, allowing us to see how earlier visions of the future continue to shape our present.

The second part features a roundtable conversation in the Art Gallery Reading Room. Moderated by Maya Allison, it brings together five curators whose work spans the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and South Asia. The discussion revisits “Gulf Futurism” and asks how curators today are rethinking the future — through hope, collaboration, and critical imagination — across diverse institutional and generational perspectives.

The evening concludes with a pop-up exhibition, Relics of Tomorrow, curated by Mustafa Thaer and Nada Ammagui. The show gathers artists who reimagine contemporary technologies as future artifacts: Talal Al Najjar’s Future Artifacts anchors a collection that treats the digital present as archaeology. Works by Hayfa Algwaiz, Basmah Felemban, Roy Dest, and Ashay Bhave explore intimacy, faith, ecology, and identity through digital media, revealing how the traces of our networks and screens may one day become relics of our own imagined futures.