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Alla Abdunabi: Solo Show Transformed How I Engage With My Work

Artist Alla Abdunabi discusses her works with visitors at the exhibition (421 Arts Campus)
Artist Alla Abdunabi discusses her works with visitors at the exhibition (421 Arts Campus)
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Alla Abdunabi: Solo Show Transformed How I Engage With My Work

Artist Alla Abdunabi discusses her works with visitors at the exhibition (421 Arts Campus)
Artist Alla Abdunabi discusses her works with visitors at the exhibition (421 Arts Campus)

Libyan-British artist Alla Abdunabi is elated by the success of her debut solo exhibition, hosted by Abu Dhabi’s 421 Arts Campus as part of its 2025 winter season.

Exploring the concept of simulacra (how symbols evolve and shape cultural narratives) and how colonial history has shaped practices of care within museums, the exhibition runs from January 30 - May 4. 

Abdunabi is among the emerging artists supported by 421 Arts Campus, an independent platform in Abu Dhabi dedicated to fostering creative talent.

This year, the institution spotlighted her work with her first solo exhibition, ”Are your memories of me enough for you?”, offering audiences an intimate glimpse into her artistic journey.

Speaking to Asharq Al-Awsat about her experience in Abu Dhabi, Abdunabi reflected on her participation in the 2025 cycle of the 421 Artistic Development Program and the launch of her first solo exhibition.

She said the program was a turning point for her, and that it gave her the chance to grow an artistic practice in a space of dialogue with other artists and mentors.

Working on a solo exhibition changed the way she engaged with her own work, she explained.

One of the key lessons Abdunabi learned was understanding how different bodies of work interact—conceptually and spatially. That added layers of complexity she found exciting, opening up new possibilities for exploration.

Conceptual Approach

Abdunabi’s academic background is not strictly in fine arts. She studied interdisciplinary design, focusing on motion graphics, spatial and experimental design, and art installations.

Her artistic practice has expanded beyond the existence of objects themselves to how they interact with the surrounding space—whether inside a white-walled gallery or in a public setting.

For Abdunabi, engaging with an artwork is as significant as the piece itself.

Research through design was a core part of her studies and remains central to Abdunabi’s approach today.

Even though the work has a conceptual nature, it always begins with research, using the history of objects to better understand the world we live in.

In “Are your memories of me enough for you?” Abdunabi examines the concept of false resemblance, questioning how truth is constructed and how objects shape specific versions of reality through their symbols.

She explores how these icons are preserved, restored, and reinterpreted over time, prompting reflections on how contemporary audiences engage with such narratives.

Her work draws from the theories of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who argued that in today’s world, images do not merely reflect reality but create their own, blurring the lines between authenticity and illusion.

In an era flooded with visual representations, Abdunabi investigates how individuals discern between the real and the fabricated.

Through her exhibition, she challenges the conventional role of images and symbols, positioning them as active agents in shaping truth rather than simply depicting it.

By presenting alternative narratives, the show encourages visitors to reflect on how easily new realities can be constructed through visual culture.

Abdunabi sees art as a fundamental force in shaping how history is remembered and interpreted. Cultural symbols, she argues, carry layers of meaning that evolve over time, influencing collective memory in ways that are not always immediately visible. Her work explores how these symbols are preserved, repurposed, or erased—and what those choices reveal about the narratives societies choose to uphold.

Her exhibition also raises critical questions about how institutions handle objects tied to histories of violence. It challenges audiences to consider how museums, archives, and galleries frame and present artifacts with legacies of displacement, destruction, or exploitation.

While these institutions often portray themselves as neutral spaces, they actively shape meaning through preservation, display, and classification.

Rather than offering definitive answers, Abdunabi’s work seeks to expose these underlying systems and interrogate the very concept of preservation. It questions whether preservation can, at times, serve as a form of erasure or control.

The exhibition also examines the relationship between objects and the spaces they inhabit—whether in public settings, artistic contexts, or museum collections—highlighting the complexities of storytelling across these different environments.

Blending Research and Artistic Experimentation

For Abdunabi, research is always the starting point of her creative process—but it extends beyond gathering information. Her approach involves complicating historical narratives and engaging in speculative and imaginative interventions through art.

Rather than treating research and artistic practice as separate processes that need balancing, she sees them as part of an ongoing dialogue. Research informs artistic decisions, while artistic interventions, in turn, open new perspectives for inquiry.

Material experimentation is also central to her practice. She combines academic research, rooted in literature and historical analysis, with sensory and experimental exploration—emphasizing the importance of physical interaction with objects and materials. This interplay between intellectual inquiry and hands-on experimentation shapes the depth and complexity of her work.

Looking Ahead: Expanding Artistic Exploration

Abdunabi aims to deepen her exploration of the themes she has been working on while pushing them into new forms. Recently, she has been reflecting on how history is confronted both within institutional spaces and beyond.

She is also keen to experiment with different media, particularly spatial and immersive approaches that enhance the experience of interacting with objects and images.

Ultimately, her goal remains the same—to continue asking questions and engaging with the world in ways that are both direct and necessary.

 

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Varieties

Heat-trapping Gas Once Frozen in Arctic Ground is Slowly Leaking, Warming the Planet

FILE - Permafrost melts on the coast in Newtok, Alaska, Aug. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)
FILE - Permafrost melts on the coast in Newtok, Alaska, Aug. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)
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Heat-trapping Gas Once Frozen in Arctic Ground is Slowly Leaking, Warming the Planet

FILE - Permafrost melts on the coast in Newtok, Alaska, Aug. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)
FILE - Permafrost melts on the coast in Newtok, Alaska, Aug. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)

As Ted Schuur stepped along the edges of Smith Lake, a bubble surfaced from the muck underfoot. And then another.

They're bubbles of methane, a potent heat-trapping gas made from decomposing plants and animals that had once been stuck in Alaska's frigid permafrost. But that frozen ground is thawing because the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the globe. For thousands of years that frozen ground stored dead plants and animals, but the accelerating thaw is allowing them to decay into methane and carbon dioxide.

“Once you start leaking this carbon out, there’s so much in the ground that it’s not going to shut off,” said Schuur, an ecologist at Northern Arizona University, calling it one of climate change's scary tipping points. “Essentially every year is setting a permafrost record.”

There’s three times as much carbon still frozen in permafrost than what’s now in the air, but all over the Arctic those heat-trapping gases are escaping into the atmosphere. Their release adds to what's already in the air from humanity's burning coal, oil and natural gas, changing the delicate balance of how a warming world deals with the buildup of heat-trapping carbon, Schuur said.

Permafrost is ground that stays frozen — below 32 degrees Fahrenheit (zero degrees Celsius) — for at least two years and often for centuries and even millennia. That frozen ground — found in Alaska, Canada, Siberia, Antarctica and high mountain elevations elsewhere — has special advantages, trapping decaying matter, keeping it from turning into greenhouse gases and just being firm enough for communities and industries to build their lives upon.

But warming is undercutting that, The Associated Press reported.

Two different studies project that by the end of this century, those previously trapped gases in permafrost will add nearly half a degree of warming (about a quarter degree Celsius) in addition to warming from the burning of fossil fuels. Over that time period, that'll warm the Earth about as much as a major industrialized country like the United States or the whole of Europe, scientists said.

A sleeping giant awakens “The permafrost system is really like a sleeping giant,” said Gustaf Hugelius, a permafrost expert at Stockholm University.

For thousands of years, when the climate was somewhat stable, the Arctic helped Earth's delicate carbon cycle by acting as a sink. That means plants in the cold areas used to pull some heat-trapping gas out of the air and capture it in the frozen ground, with the Arctic essentially withdrawing more carbon from the air than it added, benefiting the entire globe.

A few years ago, warming caused that balance to shift so that once-frozen ground is venting more heat-trapping gases than it takes in. Instead of reducing climate change, the Arctic is now adding to the problem, said Columbia University ecologist Duncan Menge.

Permafrost thaw, along with other “warming-induced emissions” from fires and changes to wetlands and lakes, are likely to increase warming by 20% by the end of the century, according to a September study co-authored by Arctic ecologist Sue Natali of the Woodwell Climate Research Center.

It may be a small amount, not worthy of scenarios of doom, but it’s something “that we’re going to have to deal with” on top of everything else, said University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver, who first calculated the half-a-degree of expected permafrost warming in a 2012 study.

What’s troublesome is that when politicians and scientists talk about future warming, they’re usually not accounting for the extra greenhouse gases from permafrost thawing, said Natali and Hugelius. So while the UN says without policy changes the world will warm 2.6 degrees C (4.7 degrees F) above pre-industrial times by the end of the century, it leaves out a few tenths of a degree from thawing permafrost, they said.

Thawing permafrost is not just messing with the planet's carbon balance, it's destabilizing the very land underfoot, making once-rigid ground collapse and sink, Natali said.

Frozen ground that's no longer firm became deadly this summer. Flooding in Nepal killed more than 1,000 people after part of a glacier collapsed, which happened after a heat wave that set records for the location and time of year, according to Berkeley Earth climate scientist Robert Rohde.

Ground that’s solidly frozen holds up mountains and skyscrapers, but once the permafrost thaws, it’s no longer strong enough. That was likely one of several still-to-be-determined factors in the Nepal disaster, said George Washington University permafrost scientist Dmitry Streletskiy, lead author of an August study that found significant permafrost thawing in most of the Northern Hemisphere.

Permafrost in Alaska and other Arctic areas has long supported homes, roads and pipelines, but it’s no longer so reliable. For example, in Galbraith on Alaska’s North Slope, a recently formed 10-foot (3-meter) deep, craterlike hole was visible during a recent foray by scientists.

These holes, known as slumps, occur when ice melts and the land collapses, releasing methane, Natali said. A Woodwell team has identified more than 40,000 of these slumps across the Arctic using satellites, according to scientist Kyle Arndt.

University of Alaska Fairbanks geophysicist Vladimir Romanovsky said when he first started studying permafrost in the 1970s, “everybody believed permafrost was very stable. People thought it was forever.”

Not anymore, he said.

“It took some thousands and tens of thousands of years to sequester this carbon into permafrost,” Romanovsky said. “You need a new ice age to put back this ice into the ground.”

A time capsule to the last ice age is visible under a Fairbanks hill where the US Army drilled a massive permafrost research tunnel. Artificially cooled and used for training, the tunnel's icy walls are dotted with bones of bison and mammoths, producing a sewage-like odor that vividly illustrates where the Arctic methane comes from.

“Every time I go there, I'm reminded of the magnitude of the problem. You smell it. You see it. You feel it all around you,” Natali said. “You see how deep the ice is and just how the carbon is buried and then when you go on top and you see these large thaw features. ... This isn't a problem of 100 years from now. This is a problem of right now.”

Varieties

When the World Saw van Gogh as ‘a Madman,’ she Saw his Genius

“Four Sunflowers Gone to Seed” Credit...Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times
“Four Sunflowers Gone to Seed” Credit...Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times
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When the World Saw van Gogh as ‘a Madman,’ she Saw his Genius

“Four Sunflowers Gone to Seed” Credit...Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times
“Four Sunflowers Gone to Seed” Credit...Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times

By Nina Siegal

It was April 1912, and Helene Kröller-Müller was on a shopping spree. She wasn’t interested in the latest shoes or fashions. She was on the hunt for Vincent van Gogh’s portrait of Madame Augustine Roulin.

She managed to find “La Berceuse,” as the painting is known, at a Paris gallery, and bought it on the spot. The next day, she went from gallery to gallery, looking for more van Gogh paintings, and took home a great haul: 15 in a single trip.

Kröller-Müller, a German heiress, had made it her life’s goal to establish a great public collection of modern art. She became one of the first major collectors to recognize van Gogh’s genius.

Now, more than a century after that Paris shopping spree, the entire collection of van Gogh paintings she assembled is on view together at the museum she built in the middle of a Dutch forest — for the first time since 1984.

It is the second-largest trove of van Gogh’s works anywhere, after the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and it was assembled by a woman who took great risks in buying his art at a time when few others dared.

The exhibition “Van Gogh: All Our Paintings” includes works like “La Berceuse,” hanging on the left side of the rear wall. Credit...Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times

The exhibition at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands, called “Van Gogh: All Our Paintings” and running through Jan. 3, presents the whole collection as Kröller-Müller conceived it: an expression of the artist’s development, range and spiritual aspirations.

“This is a rare moment that all the paintings are in the house,” said Benno Tempel, the museum’s director. “It hasn’t happened for such a long time.”

The show is organized around three themes — faith, hope and love — reflecting the spiritual dimension that Kröller-Müller saw in van Gogh’s work. It includes many of his popular works, scattered throughout these broad categories, such as “Café Terrace at Night,” “Portrait of Joseph Roulin” and “The Sower.”

Kröller-Müller, the daughter of a German industrialist, had an early interest in art but had to end her formal education at age 16. At 18, she married one of her father’s employees, who would later take over the family business. Her husband, Anton Müller, encouraged her intellectual pursuits, including her interest in art, a socially acceptable hobby for wealthy women of the era.

“If you were married at the time, you gave all your money and assets to your husband," said the exhibition’s curator, Renske Cohen Tervaert. “So it was quite open-minded of him, in a way, to allow her to follow her dream in this way.”

But Kröller-Müller didn’t collect as a hobbyist. She embraced art with a kind of religious fervor.
She bought her first van Gogh painting in 1908 for 110 guilders — about the price of an exquisite dress, said Eva Rovers, her biographer. Four months later, she bought his “Four Sunflowers Gone to Seed” for 4,000 guilders.

Prices were rising in large part because she was buying so much.

“Bridge at Arles” Credit...Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times

Kröller-Müller’s collecting philosophy was largely shaped by the art historian Henk Bremmer, with whom she took an art appreciation class, Tervaert said. She added that for Bremmer, the key component of good art was that it made the viewer feel an emotion or experience something spiritual.

Kröller-Müller went looking for art that stirred her spirit and found van Gogh.

Rovers said that van Gogh was not well regarded in the early 20th century. “If the general public knew him at all, they really considered him a madman who could not paint,” she said.

But because van Gogh had been a preacher before becoming an artist, Kröller-Müller regarded him as a man who had found a connection to faith through his art.

“She understood his wish to transcend suffering, and his aim to use art to transcend suffering,” Rovers said.

While most collectors in the Netherlands were buying old masters and 19th-century Dutch painting, Kröller-Müller focused on Cubism, Pointillism and De Stijl artists, including Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger and Pablo Picasso.

Van Gogh’s work dominated the collection for a simple reason, Rovers said: He “stood at the cradle of the beginning of avant-garde art.” Kröller-Müller built a collection, Rovers added, “that could show the broad variety of his work — landscapes, portraits, cityscapes.”

A van Gogh self-portrait from 1887. The show is organized around the themes of faith, hope and love. Credit...Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times

In the late 1930s, as Europe was approaching World War II, Kröller-Müller’s health was declining, along with her family fortune.

She decided to offer her art collection, worth about 4 million guilders at the time, along with family property in the Veluwe forest, to the Dutch state, as long as it would agree to build a museum to display it. She imagined the museum, with a 62-acre sculpture garden, as a retreat for spiritual and philosophical inquiry.

The result was a rare trove in a remote Dutch forest — now a national park — built around her collection.

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has more than 200 paintings, but its collection has a different history: It was established to show the collection of the van Gogh family, who owned the artist’s unsold works. The Kröller-Müller represents a collector’s eye.

“The Van Gogh Museum is just what was left over,” Tempel said. “This is a chosen collection.”

The New York Times

Varieties

Not Your Everyday Coffee in a Serbia Cafe. Enjoy it in the Company of Alpacas

Six alpacas roam among the tables in the Alpaca Cafe interacting with the guests in the village of Stajicevo, 50 kilometers north of Belgrade, Serbia, Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)
Six alpacas roam among the tables in the Alpaca Cafe interacting with the guests in the village of Stajicevo, 50 kilometers north of Belgrade, Serbia, Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)
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Not Your Everyday Coffee in a Serbia Cafe. Enjoy it in the Company of Alpacas

Six alpacas roam among the tables in the Alpaca Cafe interacting with the guests in the village of Stajicevo, 50 kilometers north of Belgrade, Serbia, Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)
Six alpacas roam among the tables in the Alpaca Cafe interacting with the guests in the village of Stajicevo, 50 kilometers north of Belgrade, Serbia, Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

A cafe in northern Serbia has unusual hosts: six alpacas.

The South American animals, of various sizes and colors, roam among the tables at the Tiganjica Ethno-Village resort near Stajicevo, north of Belgrade, happy to interact with the guests.

The Alpaca Cafe here opened only a week ago and is a rare sight in Europe. Tiganjica resort owner Zoran Ostojin said he got the idea in Slovakia.

“My wife and I were in an Alpaca cafe in Slovakia and we were fascinated,” Ostojin told The Associated Press. “We wanted people in our country to get to know alpacas and feel this animal and its energy.”

Calm and friendly, alpacas are known for their mild character and easy disposition. While related to llamas and camels, alpacas are smaller, loved for their soft fleece and gentle humming sounds they produce to communicate.

A man feeds alpacas in the Alpaca Cafe happy in the village of Stajicevo, 50 kilometers north of Belgrade, Serbia, Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

The alpacas in Tiganjica mingle with the visitors who often come in organized tours to see the animals and spend time in their company.

Written on a board are house rules. Visitors are asked not to approach the alpacas from behind or feed them any food they brought along. Guests are instead given small buckets with carrots, lettuce and apples.

Visits must be prearranged and the cost is around 10 euros ($11.35), which includes a drink and a bucket with alpaca food.

All six animals differ in character, according to the alpacas' carer Simona Frangi, who said a black alpaca called Ljubica is grumpy, while Snezana is the herd leader despite being the smallest of all.

A woman feeds an alpaca in the Alpaca Cafe happy in the village of Stajicevo, 50 kilometers north of Belgrade, Serbia, Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

“They are very sensitive to people's intentions,” Frangi explained. “They feel if someone wants to harm them, they move away. But if someone wants to offer something, they will come close.”

Ostojin runs a small zoo within his resort, which also includes a restaurant and a garden on the family estate. Ostojin said it all started because he and his brother were bringing over injured animals to care for since they were boys.

The first alpaca came as a present from the Belgrade Zoo eight years ago. Ostojin said he “very much liked the energy, the emotion that this animal sends out.”

“Almost like a healing ability,” he said.