At NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, Ala Younis presents her first West Asia retrospective, Past of a Temporal Universe — a wide-ranging study of how history is performed, rehearsed and continually reshaped. Known for her research-driven approach and her ability to weave together archives, architecture and cinematic memory, Younis positions time as both material and subject.
Gathering two decades of work, the exhibition includes well-known pieces such as Nefertiti (2008), Tin Soldiers (2010–11), and Plan and Plan (fem.) for Greater Baghdad (2015, 2018), alongside three new works created in 2025. Across these installations, Younis traces how political structures, national narratives and personal stories intersect to form unstable versions of history.
The exhibition opens with High Dam (Modern Pyramid) (2019), a bold architectural installation inspired by the Aswan High Dam. Through geometric forms, Younis constructs a theatrical stage where political leaders, filmmakers, soldiers and symbolic characters appear as components of a national myth. Each shape acts like a narrative agent rather than a static sculpture, revealing the layers of ideology embedded in the dam’s story.
Adjacent rooms expand this inquiry through High Dam (Concrete Poetry) (2023–25) and Study Structure (2025), created with Dr. Masha Kirasirova. These installations weave archival photographs, drawings and official documents into visually dense configurations, demonstrating how state-led projects were crafted and circulated through images. Paired with paintings from the Barjeel Art Foundation, they highlight the many ways artists interpreted the dam at the time, situating Younis’s research within a historical continuum.
Further along, Enactment (2017) isolates figures from political archives — such as individuals attempting to cross the Berlin Wall — and places them against blank backgrounds. Removed from their original scenes, these bodies become performers in a silent theatre, revealing how historical gestures continue to echo long after their documentation.
One of the exhibition’s largest installations, Plan and Plan (fem.) for Greater Baghdad, transforms an architectural model of the Saddam Hussein Gymnasium (designed by Le Corbusier) into a dynamic stage. Surrounded by small figurines, the model becomes a site where architectural ambition, political aspiration and personal histories collide.
The exhibition concludes with Younis’s newest series, Climate Conditions (2025), which depicts Abu Dhabi’s buildings through mosaics and coloured-pencil drawings. These works focus on material time: cracks, shifts and expansions caused by the city’s climate. The result is a poetic sense of dislocation, as if these contemporary structures already belong to the past.
Past of a Temporal Universe suggests that history is not fixed. Instead, it is an ongoing rehearsal — a temporal landscape where the present steadily reshapes the past.
The exhibition runs until 18 January 2026.
