Frieze Abu Dhabi

19 - 22 November 2026 
With major institutional recognition behind them, this presentation brings together five significant artists from West and South Asia and East and Southeast Africa: Bertina Lopes (1924–2012), Juliana Seraphim (1934–2005), Basil Alkazzi (1938–2025), Everlyn Nicodemus (b. 1954), and Reena Kallat (b. 1973). Spanning generations and geographies, the artists share an interest in questions of displacement, memory, identity and the psychological legacies of migration.

A pioneer of African modernism, Bertina Lopes received major recognition at the 36th Bienal de São Paulo (2025–26), where 21 paintings were presented. Juliana Seraphim was an early participant in international biennales, exhibiting in Alexandria (1962), Paris (1963, 1969) and São Paulo (1965). Everlyn Nicodemus was the subject of a landmark retrospective travelling from the National Galleries of Scotland (2024–25) to WIELS, Brussels (2025–26). Reena Kallat’s multidisciplinary practice has been widely exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale. Basil Alkazzi was a prolific painter whose career spanned over six decades, with works now held in major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Royal College of Art, London; and the National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters, Kuwait.

Richard Saltoun Gallery will present works dating from the 1970s onwards, bringing together painting and assemblage. The presentation emphasises affinities rather than chronology: from Lopes, Seraphim and Nicodemus’s explorations of displacement, memory and lived experience to Kallat’s investigations of borders, migration and collective memory, and Alkazzi’s poetic engagement with cycles of life, landscape and spiritual transformation. Together, these practices reveal diverse ways the artists have negotiated histories of movement, belonging and place through their work.
 
Additional works will be on display by Fathi Hassan (b. 1957) and Marta Roberti (b. 1977). 
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