Phenomenological Alphabet

Phenomenological Alphabet is a group exhibition of six artists in the Project Space of the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, in The Arts Center on Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi, from 19 August to 4 October 2026. The artists are Aya Afaneh, Sarah Afaneh, Sarah Brahim, Amir Hazim, Yoonsik Chico Park and Andrew Riad.

The exhibition considers language-building through what the gallery calls "the sensation of experiencing one's being", and how language begins as an interaction with material, from sound and voice to marks. Aya Afaneh uses the body as a tool of mark-making. Sarah Brahim works with embodied gestures in choreography. Andrew Riad works with sound, body and gesture. Yoonsik Chico Park looks at existing letter characters, where a sound and a symbol can hold several meanings. Sarah Afaneh uses symbol-making to transform historical language, and Amir Hazim captures the body and reconstructs the perception of movement. The gallery illustrates the exhibition with Park's Ah [아] (2024), a single channel video with paper envelopes, stamp and ink.

The gallery writes that here "meaning does not necessarily precede the making: it can emerge through the body, sound, symbol, and material itself."

The gallery page names no curator. In its words, the artist Aya Afaneh "invites a dialogue with artists from her community whose practices have intersected, over time, with questions she explores in her own practice." Sarah Brahim, born in Riyadh, is a visual and performance artist and a 2025 fellow of the Pina Bausch Fellowship for Dance and Choreography.

The Project Space, the gallery's auxiliary venue in The Arts Center, is a non-commercial gallery that gives priority to exhibitions from the academic and regional community, including faculty-curated exhibitions, experimental projects and the work of regional emerging artists.