Patterns of Power: Abu Dhabi Exhibition Examines Invisible Rules Shaping Daily Life

Rizq Art Initiative’s latest group exhibition opened at its Reem Island home in Abu Dhabi with a curatorial premise that feels quietly urgent: the patterns shaping human life are largely invisible to the people living them.

Unseen Script, running until October 28, brings together 10 artists whose practices circle questions of repetition, memory and observation. Chief curator Meena Vari frames the show around a central claim: routines so familiar they escape notice, a repeated commute, objects arranged in a room, light crossing a skyline, carry meaning precisely because they go unexamined. Shafeena Yusuff Ali, founder and executive director of Rizq Art Initiative (founded in 2023), puts it plainly: “Every household keeps a script no one wrote down, the gestures, routines and small fidelities through which a life quietly holds itself together.”

The timing is deliberate. Vari points to artificial intelligence as the exhibition’s quiet provocation. “We are in this time of artificial intelligence where patterns become the code, and the code then comes back to us and will pre-empt things for us,” she explains. The show does not make AI its subject. Instead, it uses that technological capacity as a lens to ask what human consciousness and subjective experience reveal that machine pattern-recognition cannot. “As artists and as individuals, we always have our own consciousness, which is different from an artificial intelligence,” Vari notes.

The works span dramatically different physical scales. Indian artist Abdulla P A contributes an oil painting stretching more than 10 metres. Colombian-French artist Ana Escobar Saavedra presents intimate assemblages built from seashells and found objects, many accented with gold. The contrast is structural: Abdulla’s piece demands distance to comprehend its scope; Saavedra’s draws viewers close to catch details easily missed. Abdulla’s canvas engages with home through natural and human-made structures, with particular attention to abandoned dwellings across South Asia and the Middle East where migration or economic pressures leave houses empty and allow nature to reclaim them. His interest in biomimicry extends that inquiry into connections between human habitation and forms created by other living creatures.

Saavedra collects seashells from beaches and reassembles them in her studio. Vari reads this as an act of elevation. “She could have used anything else, but she’s using this broken, dying thing,” the curator observes.

By contrast, Emirati artist Nasir Nasrallah takes a distinctly personal route, having spent time among objects in an antique shop once owned by his grandfather in Sharjah, inventing narratives around what he found there. His works in Unseen Script function as diary entries. Lebanese artist Fadi Balhawan combines language, calligraphy and abstraction in a manner Vari characterizes as drawing with words, using language like poetry. Emirati pioneer Najat Makki moves into three dimensions with steel works that extend her abstract practice, long known for its emphasis on color and landscape.

The exhibition also includes Emirati artist Nujoom Alghanem, who represented the UAE at the Venice Biennale in 2019, alongside Lebanese-Palestinian artist Joanna Barakat, Palestinian artist Neveen Abu Samra, and Indian-born Simrin Mehra Agarwal. Mehra Agarwal examines decaying palm leaves; Abu Samra repurposes everyday discarded materials. Alghanem’s paintings explore the relationship between city and nature, frequently omitting a conventional horizon line and presenting the cityscape itself as the horizon defining contemporary reality.

Vari’s curatorial method involves identifying recurring patterns within each artist’s individual practice, locating the moments when a creator returns repeatedly to the same concerns. Ali describes this as another layer of observation: “It’s also Meena saying: ‘I see your pattern, and I want other people to see it too.’”

The natural world runs through the exhibition as a parallel force. “There is a script that is being written for us by nature too,” Vari says. That thread connects Abdulla’s reclaimed dwellings, Saavedra’s reassembled shells and Mehra Agarwal’s decomposing leaves into something larger than any individual work.

Ali frames Unseen Script as a statement about how Rizq Art Initiative intends to operate going forward, anticipating conversations that will matter in five years rather than simply reflecting current discourse. Vari is careful not to close the loop too neatly. The exhibition identifies scripts and patterns running through everyday life, but it does not prescribe their meaning. “You read it your way,” she says.

Whether that openness holds as AI’s capacity to pre-empt human behavior grows more precise is the question the show leaves hanging in the air.