The NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Art Gallery’s auxiliary venue, the Project Space, will launch its Fall 2025–Spring 2026 season with Projects of Art Ethnography, on view from November 6 through December 7, 2025. The season continues with Rusting Echoes (January 15–February 15, 2026) and A Room of Our Own (February 26–March 22, 2026), showcasing a range of artistic practices that explore the intersections of identity, time, and collective storytelling.
Located in The Arts Center and supported by the NYUAD Art Gallery team, the Project Space is a non-commercial gallery dedicated to experimental, community-focused exhibitions that foster dialogue between academic and regional art practices.
Projects of Art Ethnography (November 6–December 7, 2025)
Projects of Art Ethnography brings together works by Lydia Nakashima Degarrod and Susan Ossman, two artist-anthropologists whose practices merge research and creative expression. Their work reflects on migration, memory, and identity, exploring how human stories are shaped and shared through art.
Degarrod’s mixed-media works draw from dreams, displacement, and her Asian and Latin American heritage. She is an advisor to the Asian American Women Artists Association and a professor at the California College of the Arts. Ossman, Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Professor of Movements, Spaces and Cultural Practices at NYU Abu Dhabi, has developed her artistic and ethnographic practice across Susan Ossman has developed her work in and across several continents, with a focus on Morocco, France, the USA, and the UAE. The two have collaborated for more than a decade on exhibitions and workshops that connect anthropology and art through shared narratives and creative participation.
The opening reception for Projects is Thursday, November 6, at 5:30 PM, and is free and open to the public.
Rusting Echoes, curated by Sarrah Bashir (January 15–February 15, 2026)
Curated by Sarrah Bashir, Rusting Echoes features artwork by Yoshi (Aisha Al Ali), Ammar Al Banna, Ahmed Al Kuwaiti, and Shaikha Al Shamsi, and reflects on time as both a physical and emotional presence. Instead of measuring time, the exhibition explores how it unfolds through transformation, memory, and material change.
Through slow, process-driven methods, the participating artists capture time’s passage through touch, repetition, and decay, inviting viewers to sense it as texture and resonance in what fades and endures. The title suggests both endurance and transformation: “rust” as the visible trace of time, and “echoes” as the lingering memories of lived experience.
Bashir is an Abu Dhabi-based art educator and researcher whose work centers on accessibility, inclusive education, and community engagement in the arts.
A Room of Our Own (February 26–March 22, 2026)
Closing the season, A Room of Our Own is an ongoing archival and artistic project by Surabhi Sharma, Associate Dean for the Arts and Creative Practices and Associate Professor of Practice at NYU Abu Dhabi. The project stems from conversations with more than 50 women filmmakers who studied at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), reflecting on gender, authorship, and the making of Indian cinema.
Through interviews, photographs, and film clips, A Room of Our Own challenges the ways in which national film histories are written by foregrounding an oral history project of women filmmakers paying close attention to the ways in which their experience and work is often erased. The exhibition also reflects on how archives can preserve care and complexity while capturing personal and collective memories of women making cinema.
