Their work uses playful creativity and personal memories to explore the experiences and emotions of growing up.
Abu Dhabi: Somewhere in your childhood, there was probably a white plastic chair. It stood on a balcony, in a garden or beside the beach. It was made for sitting, but children often found better uses for it. It became a boat, a hiding place, a throne or a makeshift playground.
Years later, those familiar chairs have returned in a different form in Emirati artist Reem Al Mubarak’s exhibition, What We Left in the Sandbox. Cast in aluminium and displayed on the gallery walls, the chairs carry another detail: visitors can see their own reflections in the metal, becoming part of the memories represented in the artwork.
“When you’re closer, your reflection becomes part of the work,” Reem said. “When people interact, they see themselves in it, quite literally.”
Presented at the Rizq Art Initiative in Abu Dhabi, the exhibition brings together Reem’s memories of childhood with the curatorial vision of Emirati architect and researcher Azza Aboualam. Through familiar objects, unusual materials and interactive installations, the two women explore how memories change over time and how personal experiences can connect with a wider audience.
An exhibition built around the shifting nature of memory
What We Left in the Sandbox considers memory as something that is never entirely fixed. Some details remain vivid, others disappear, and some quietly change as people revisit the past.
Reem, an Emirati artist and author who grew up in Abu Dhabi, uses materials associated with childhood play to explore forgotten places and everyday objects. The exhibition includes small sand houses suspended from thick white ropes, foil impressions of plastic chairs, bubble wrap marked by the trace of a bicycle, and torn panels carrying unfinished poems.
At the centre stands a large golden house, built to be entered and experienced rather than simply viewed.
The choice of sand runs through the entire exhibition. Before turning it into artwork, Reem spent a year researching its science, travelling across the UAE to collect samples and study them under a microscope. She examined how sand forms, oxidises and binds together.
The exhibition’s colours reflect this research, from the pale, bright tones of Saadiyat to the iron-rich reds of Al Ain and the softer yellows found in Abu Dhabi.
Reem’s interest in stones also comes from childhood. She used to collect a stone from every place she visited and still keeps a cabinet full of them. To understand how rocks form, she began breaking them apart.
“I realized they’re all based on sand. A single grain is tiny in size, but mighty,” she said.
For Reem, the connection extends beyond geology. Memories, like sand, are made of small fragments. Each one may seem insignificant on its own, but together they form something much larger.
A childhood home remembered differently
One of the exhibition’s central installations is a sand house inspired by Reem’s childhood home. It rises like a castle, with unusually high walls and windows positioned far beyond an adult’s normal reach.
Her parents have told her that the original doorway was never as large as she remembers it. But the installation is not intended to recreate the house with architectural accuracy. It represents how the space felt to a child.
Inside, the windows sit at the height of a little girl trying to look outside. Visitors are invited to experience the proportions of the home through that childhood perspective.
“Everything you see is not the actual house. It’s a distortion of my own interpretation,” Reem explained.
The installation captures a familiar feature of childhood memory. Ordinary spaces can feel enormous when experienced for the first time. A doorway becomes monumental, a room feels endless, and the smallest details can carry a lasting sense of comfort.
Collective memory, play and nostalgia
For curator Azza Aboualam, memory is inherently subjective. Even when people try to reconstruct an experience, they cannot be certain that the version they remember matches what actually happened.
“Memory is always subjective. You can never really reconstruct it in full, and even once you do, how do you know that was the reality?” Azza said.
Reem studied visual arts and began her career in 2017. This is her second solo exhibition and her largest to date. The project began with a conversation in December 2024 and took a year to bring to life.
Asked to describe the exhibition in three words, Reem chose “collective memory, play, a little bit of nostalgia.”
The word we in the exhibition’s title is particularly important to her. Although the memories originate in her own childhood, she wants visitors to find their own experiences within the work.
“The we is every single person who comes in and relates to the space. As much as it’s mine, it is equally or even more for the audience,” she said.
The sandbox becomes a shared reference point. It represents a place where children played, left their toys behind, and created memories without thinking about how those moments might be remembered years later.
Why visitors are encouraged to touch the artwork
Azza approached the exhibition as an architect and deliberately avoided giving visitors a fixed route through the gallery. Instead, the space functions as a playground where people can move around, interact with the installations and discover details at their own pace.
“The viewer is a player in Reem’s playground. Everyone has a memory of bubble wrap as a child,” Azza said.
The plastic chairs follow the same idea. They are familiar objects, but their purpose changes when children turn them into toys.
The exhibition also challenges the traditional gallery experience, where visitors are generally expected to admire artwork from a distance.
Azza said the space invites people to enter installations, touch the sand, and interact with the work.
The metal puzzle is one example. It is heavy enough to require physical effort to move its pieces. The image represents a childhood moment Reem shared with her grandfather, but the puzzle can never be completed. Its unfinished form reflects the fragmented nature of memory.
When Reem first saw the assembled work in the gallery, she was overwhelmed by the experience.
“I made a toy that’s an artwork. I did not know that it was possible,” she said.
A childhood game that captures the tenderness of growing up
Play in the exhibition is not limited to objects and installations. It also carries emotional meaning.
Two sandboards feature games of Tic-Tac-Toe. In the first, two opponents block each other until neither can win. The second records a game between Reem and her nine-year-old niece.
Reem recalled that she wanted her niece to win as soon as they started playing.
“The second we started playing, I knew I wanted her to win. There is that sensitivity of a child. You never want to break their heart,” she said.
The difference appears in the artwork’s bilingual text. The English version reads, “I used to play to win.” The Arabic version expresses that it is now her turn to lose.
For Reem, the moment also reflects the kindness she experienced growing up. Someone once allowed her to win, and the happiness that brought her is something she now wants to pass on.
“That shows you how I had a beautiful childhood,” she said, “because someone else once made me win, and it made me excited about that.”
When Arabic and English tell different stories
Language adds another layer to the exhibition. Reem’s artwork titles appear in both Arabic and English, but the translations are not always literal.
The chair series, for example, is titled We Never Used Them Properly in English. Its Arabic title means roughly that the chair was a toy.
Reem describes the exhibition as a kind of mind game, offering visitors enough information to begin interpreting the work without explaining every detail.
“I give you enough but never truly reveal it,” she said.
The differences between the two languages allow the same artwork to carry slightly different meanings, much like memories that shift depending on who is recalling them.
Two Emirati women contributing to Abu Dhabi’s art scene
The exhibition arrives during a period of activity for Abu Dhabi’s art community. For Azza, presenting the work alongside another Emirati woman is a meaningful part of the experience.
“It’s two Emirati women representing the art scene at the moment. It makes me feel proud and hopeful for the future,” she said.
Reem also hopes the exhibition makes her country proud. Although the work draws heavily from her own childhood, its references to Abu Dhabi’s beaches, farms and family homes give it a wider connection to the place where she grew up.
What We Left in the Sandbox runs from 6 November 2026 to 10 January 2027 at the Rizq Art Initiative in Abu Dhabi.
For Reem, the exhibition carries a message that extends beyond childhood nostalgia. Adult life often brings fixed routines and responsibilities, from work and exercise to family roles. Yet the curiosity and willingness to play that define childhood are worth holding on to.
As she puts it, adults should remember the curious, childlike nature they should never lose touch with.
Reem Al Mubarak and Azza Aboualam are the creators of the Exhibition, What We Left in the Sandbox.
Rahf Youssef
Source: Gulf News
