Artists: Hamra Abbas, Ahmed Alaqra, Jumairy, Ryoichi Kurokawa, Rintaro Fuse, YOKOMAE et BOUAYAD
Curated by Sophie Mayuko Arni
Venue: Louvre Abu Dhabi, Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Exhibition Website
Louvre Abu Dhabi Richard Mille Art Prize, Art Here 2025: Shadows
Louvre Abu Dhabi and luxury Swiss watchmaking brand Richard Mille opened the fifth edition of the Louvre Abu Dhabi Art Here exhibition, featuring six contemporary artworks by seven artists shortlisted for the Richard Mille Art Prize. On view until 28 December 2025, the exhibition reaffirms the museum’s commitment to supporting contemporary artistic practice from the region and beyond.
Curated by guest curator Sophie Mayuko Arni, Art Here 2025 invited artists to respond to the theme Shadows, exploring the interplay between light and absence, visibility and concealment, and the layered dimensions of memory, identity, and transformation. Reflecting the richness of regional creativity, this year’s edition welcomed over 400 proposals from artists based in the GCC and Japan, along with artists from the MENA region with a GCC connection.
All photographs courtesy of the Louvre Abu Dhabi and Richard Mille Art Prize.
Ahmed Alaqra, I remember.a light (2025)
Analogue photography, 3D-printed plastics, acrylic cubes
Courtesy of the Louvre Abu Dhabi and Richard Mille Art Prize
Biography:
Ahmed Alaqra is a Palestinian artist, architect, and curator whose practice interrogates the visual and material languages that shape our public realms. Working across photography, text, installation, and archival forms, he explores how meaning is constructed around everyday objects. His approach often centres on processes of unmaking and unlearning, challenging dominant narratives and opening space for alternative ways of seeing and learning.
Alaqra has curated exhibitions across Europe and the Arab world, with recent projects including I Will Write Our Will Above the Clouds, a touring exhibition, and Salt-Kissed at Hayy Jameel in Jeddah. His work has also been presented at institutions such as the Qattan Foundation, ICD Brookfield Place, the Spore Initiative, and POUSH. Alaqra is the co-founder of the FANA’ Collective and EL-GORFEH - Palestine’s first community darkroom - both serving as experimental platforms for shared making, reflection, and collective agency. Currently, he is a fellow of the Arab Documentary Photography Program (ADPP).
Artwork Overview:
I remember. a light is a sculptural installation composed of translucent resin cubes, each containing the shape of a specific shadow. Sourced and modeled from analogue photographs taken in Sharjah - where the artist grew up - and Dubai, these shadows are not dramatic or iconic, but drawn from quiet, everyday interactions between light and urban surfaces: a stairwell’s edge, the lattice pattern cast by a palm, the brief shelter beneath a car. The work is both recollection and structure - a quiet archive of ephemeral contact between city, body, and sun.
Each cube is filled with three-dimensional form of a shadow, transforming a fleeting moment into a lasting form. The cubes are then assembled on shelves with free-standing 3D- printed shadows, forming library like structures. From a distance, the installation reads as a collection; up close, it reveals a series of intimate moments - preserved impressions of light meeting material and then moving on. The work draws conceptual resonance from the mashrabiya, a traditional architectural element that filters light, air, and visibility. Like the mashrabiya, the cubes modulate perception - offering thresholds rather than images, and memory instead of monumentality.
Alaqra’s broader practice often explores deformation as a form of spatial reclamation. Here, that approach is reflected in the inversion of shadow from negative space into sculptural volume. The result is an installation that reflects on light not as illumination, but as encounter.