Iris Projects made debut in Art Dubai with Abdullah Al Othman's artworks

DUBAI: Contemporary art gallery Iris Projects had its debut participation in Art Dubai, unveiling a new large-scale, site-specific installation by Saudi artist Abdullah Al Othman (April 16-20).

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Iris Projects showed Abdullah Al Othman's work in the Bawwaba section at Art Dubai (Booth W4), curated by Mirjam Varadinis; the section highlighted artists from the Global South and Iris Projects was the only gallery from the GCC participating there. Manifesto: the Language & the City (2025) was a series of multimedia works originally conceived for the Diriyah Biennale (2011) and subsequently presented at the 16th Lyon Biennale (2022). In this most recent iteration, the artist continued to chronicle the linguistic and architectural evolution of Riyadh, commenting on the fluidity of language, architecture and collective memory, in times of transformation.

Concurrently, Iris Projects is also presenting a solo exhibition by Al Othman in its gallery spaces in Abu Dhabi. Structural Syntaxis curated by Irina Stark; it is Al Othman's first solo show in the UAE and is a commentary on fleeting nostalgia and vanishing collective history. The interplay between structural anatomy and language in the artist's work is "akin to applying ultraviolet light to the skeleton of a building, deconstructing traditional forms to reveal new cultural narratives and systems of meaning," says Iris Projects.