Hyphen Contemporary, a new curatorial platform for emerging artists and a new generation of collectors, will launch in Abu Dhabi this October. Its first exhibition, Consolidation is Reconsolidation, runs for five days at Mina Zayed. It brings together five UAE-based artists whose work looks at memory and how it changes.
Abu Dhabi-based Cecelia Jihu-Sara founded the platform this year to give early-stage artists a way to reach wider audiences. She also wants to connect those artists with people who are just beginning to collect. The opening show puts their work in a curated exhibition setting at a more accessible price point. That makes it an easy first step for anyone thinking about starting a collection.
The exhibition starts from a quietly unsettling idea. A memory is not filed away and taken out again unchanged. Each time we recall something, we reopen it and set it down again slightly different. The memories we return to most are the ones we have rewritten most. The five artists work from things that happened to themselves, their families, their countries and to strangers they will never know. They also work from the archives, files and servers where memory looks permanent but isn't. Across photography, painting, sculpture and scent, the result is five accounts of the past that refuse to line up.
Rayan Aljneibi (b. 2000, Abu Dhabi) brings a background in archival science to the way records of a place shift as they are preserved. Layla Doueidi (b. 2001, Beirut) works with photography and scent. She draws on her Syrian-Lebanese heritage, family archives and a recent return to Syria to explore the space between inherited and lived memory. Sara Kamar (b. 2003, Abu Dhabi) uses painting and sculpture to look at how digital infrastructure shapes memory and identity. Martin Ong Yambao (b. 1995, Manila) draws on pagtatawas, a Filipino healing ritual, working with wax and found photographs to consider loss and preservation. The youngest of the five, Husna Samer (b. 2005, Abu Dhabi), uses symbolism and surrealism to explore identity, remembrance and the shifting meaning of home.
Essential Details:
- Dates: October 15-19, 2026
- Times: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.
- Opening evening: Thursday, October 15, 2026 at 5 p.m. to 9 p.m.
- Curator-led tour: Saturday, October 17, 2026 at 3 p.m.
- Location: Region Concept Store, Mina Zayed, Abu Dhabi