The NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Art Gallery, the University’s academic museum-gallery, has opened its first-ever virtual exhibition, titled not in, of, along, or relating to a line. On view until July 10, 2021, the exhibition invites a new perspective on virtual and screen-based contemporary art, of particular relevance during COVID-19. Co-curated by Chief Curator at NYU Abu Dhabi and Executive Director of The NYUAD Art Gallery Maya Allison, and NYUAD faculty member and artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg, the exhibition unveiled four new commissions, alongside fourteen existing artworks.

In this exhibition of “born digital” work, artists make visible both the restrictions and the freedoms that a digital landscape offers. Four newly commissioned works also respond, directly and indirectly, to the pandemic’s role in our technological lives. In her new commission, Cao Fei uses augmented reality to create an imaginary friend, a doppelganger of her son, who interacts with her real-life son. Lee Blalock continues her Ev3ryd4y Cyb0rg series, bringing her human-machine hybrid character into the COVID-19 lockdown present. Addie Wagenknecht takes on the YouTube makeup tutorial, using it to teach cybersecurity in an accessible and humorous way, with particular attention to the events in the US recently. The Art Gallery’s Executive Director, Allison, describes a mysterious fourth new commission, “like other museums and galleries, we are proud to present a virtual tour of our physical space, where Maryam Al Hamra has curated an exhibition of sculptures from a museum in an alternate reality.” 

These commissions, together with existing works by Sophia Al-Maria, Zach Blas, Eva and Franco Mattes, micha cárdenas, and the collective of Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian, explore how identities, histories, and futures are created, transformed, or invented.

“We began our curatorial process with a question: what might a virtual exhibition be? In the pre-pandemic norm of exhibitions, you and your body physically enter the exhibition hall, to be surrounded by, immersed in, art. However, most digitally born art doesn’t enter that physical exhibition hall so easily. As a non-object, it lives always behind a computer screen, between what we might call the ‘object-ness’ of the monitor, and the ‘virtual-ness’ of the digital artwork’s original form. Today, we often hold that screen, that world, in the palm of our hands. The smartphone was already an extension of our bodies before the pandemic -- in a way, we have all already embarked on a journey of self-modification through technology. Through these works, each artist here takes as their subject this matter of agency, self-determination, and technology’s promise of liberation or threat of suffocation.”