The museum space of New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) has launched its second decade on Saadiyat Island with a focus on the “big questions” that drive artists, scholars, and universities. The midcareer retrospective of Ala Younis asks: how can we investigate our temporal universe?

Younis is a globally recognized researcher, curator, and publisher, activities that make up aspects of her practice as an artist. The exhibition now open at NYUAD’s Art Gallery, titled “Past of a Temporal Universe,” marks her first institutional survey show in West Asia. Through her multiple, long-iterating bodies of work, Younis challenges audiences to piece together new understandings from traces of history behind the scenes of the world stage. Younis writes, 

“Being one of Abu Dhabi’s Majid Magazine readers as a child, I learned to be inquisitive about Arab culture in the world. I became committed to personalized storytelling with awareness of cultural context. I weave between the personal and the collective in my storytelling. Working within a university museum context makes possible many added layers of exchange with others who study, teach, and learn around the questions that drive my investigation.”

Informed by her training in architecture and visual cultures, Younis’s projects center on the physical developments and narrative intersections of the Arab geographies in which she grew up, frequently drawing from a wide range of formal and informal archives. Her archival installations, textiles, murals, mosaics, and drawings make subtle, startling connections among political, social, urban, and popular imaginaries. 

The exhibition debuts a series of four major new commissions alongside iterations of landmark projects for which she is best known, including Plan for Greater Baghdad, Nefertiti, and Tin Soldiers. Together, these works trace conceptual and formal throughlines in her work, from the tools and skills she developed as she emerged in the art scene of Amman, Jordan, to her experiments in navigating new knowledge as she evolved the unique methods and perspective for which she is renowned today.

This survey exhibition emerges from an exchange made uniquely possible in the nested layers of a museum space, in a research university, on an island deeply invested in the future of cultural and knowledge production, for an audience comprising hundreds of nationalities. The tension between cultural and political sovereignty in the last century of the region’s history simmers under the presentation of this work—largely dealing with the reshaping of the Arab world since World War II. 

At NYU Abu Dhabi, Younis developed work in concert with multiple scholarly frameworks. A new chapter in her High Dam project emerged from her collaboration with a scholar of Soviet-Arab relations, NYUAD associate professor of history Masha Kirasirova. Other work in the exhibition was developed with support from NYUAD’s al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, and the Arts and Humanities Research Forums.

In answer to the question of how to make a retrospective from such a scholarly and hybrid practice, Maya Allison, NYUAD’s galleries executive director and university chief curator, writes:

“I have long-admired Younis’s hybrid practice as artist-researcher-curator. Working with her animates my thinking about the future of art exhibitions in the era of global museums, and the need for this kaleidoscopic approach to new understandings of our past and future. Within a university, our mandate as an academic museum is to consider exactly the kind of complex questions that Younis asks in her work, and to make possible this kind of deep and sustained experimentation with research and form, and collaboration across disciplines.”

“Ala Younis: Past of a Temporal Universe” is on view through January 18, 2026.

About the artist

Younis’s projects have appeared in exhibitions worldwide. She has participated in the biennials of Dhaka, Istanbul, Venice, Gwangju, Ural, Orléans, Ljubljana, Kaunas, Sharjah, and the Islamic Arts in Jeddah, as well as the New Museum Triennial: “The Ungovernables” (2012, New York). She curated Kuwait’s first pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2013), served as co-head of Berlinale’s Forum Expanded (2021–24), co-artistic director of Singapore Biennale 2022, artistic director of the Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne (2023-2025), and a recent research scholar at al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, at New York University Abu Dhabi. She co-founded the independent publishing initiative, Kayfa ta, which researches and publishes on and through independent endeavors. Her work and writings are published in numerous publications, including e-flux, Nafas Art, Mizna Journal, Ibraaz, Creative Time, Camera Austria, Divan Journal, and Flash Art. Younis holds a BSc in architecture from the University of Jordan (1997) and an MRes in visual cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London (2016).

Younis’s artworks are in several major institutional collections, including: Le Frac Centre-Val de Loire (France); Darat al Funun (Jordan); the Uppsala Art Museum (Sweden); Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah Art Foundation, and Jameel Art Collection (all UAE); and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (US).