Art Asia Pacific's Kevin Jones reviewed Proximities: Contemporary Art from the United Arab Emirates at the Seoul Museum of Art, on view from 16 December 2025 and co-curated by Maya El Khalil and Eunju Kim, a survey of more than 110 works by 47 UAE-based artists.
Rather than a conventional showcase of national branding, Jones reads the exhibition's three parts, A Place for Turning, Recording Distance Not Topography, and That Thing Amphibian, as built around collision and non-resolution, tracing overlaps between Korean and Emirati societies shaped by technology and capital. Among the artists he singles out, alongside Shaikha Al Mazrou, Rashed Qurwash, Hassan Sharif, Tarek Elkassouf, Vikram Divecha, Cristiana de Marchi, Mohammed Kazem and Kholoud Sharafi, is Hazem Harb, whose 2024 collage Fragmentation #1, a fractured map of Palestine, is discussed as a work that refuses to sit still, its cut and layered surface resisting a single fixed reading of territory.
The review situates that piece within Harb's ongoing practice of collaging archival and cartographic material to unsettle official images of Palestinian land, extending a body of work Tabari has shown in Dubai across the Gauze and Not There, Yet Felt exhibitions, and framing Proximities as a significant institutional showing for that practice in Asia.
