Abu Dhabi Art 2025

‘Under One Sky’ stages a clear dialogue of land and sky. Two distinct material languages converge to map the space between intimacy and immensities.

Joseph Aina paints landscapes and luminous skies that act as portals. Layer by layer, his surfaces hold the stillness of thresholds—those moments at the edge of day when light softens and intention is clear. Aina’s works do not prescribe meaning; they anchor and expand rooms, inviting viewers to cross the horizon line with their eyes and eschew conventions of time. In this register, painting becomes a place to pause, to reset, to consider one’s insignificance against, as well as one’s place within a larger field of existence.

Samuel Nnorom starts from the hand. He wraps and ties pre-loved textiles around foam to form clusters that swell across walls and creep into corners. Each “bubble” is its own story, coming together to form a constellation: a social sky where individual lives are distinct yet inseparable. His installations gently invade space, not as intrusion but as embrace, reminding us that communities are built by accumulation—gesture by gesture, knot by knot.

Across Nigeria and the Gulf, cloth and sky are shared languages. Cloth marks welcome, celebration, and kinship; skies at dawn and dusk set the rhythm of prayer and pause. Read this way, Nnorom’s “clothscapes” echo social bonds and everyday repair, while Aina’s horizons hold the quiet intervals many homes recognise. The works meet on routes shaped by trade and movement, inviting viewers from Nigeria and the Middle East to recognise their own rituals of care, gathering, and looking up.

Together, ‘Under One Sky’ asks a shared question: how do we hold our individual lives within something immeasurably large, and feel both truths at once? Aina offers the portal to the horizon that steadies and the sky that opens; Nnorom offers the constellation to reach towards and the ties that connect.