Booth G1, Curated Section
Art Fair Dates: Thursday 19 – Sunday 22 November 2026
VIP Preview (by invitation only): Thursday 19 November, 2PM – 9PM
Public Opening Hours: Friday 20 - Sunday 22 November, 2PM – 9PM
Address: Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi, UAE

Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to announce its participation at the inaugural edition of Frieze Abu Dhabi, taking place at Manarat Al Saadiyat from 19 to 22 November 2026, with a solo presentation by Jordanian artist Ala Younis (b. 1974, Kuwait). The presentation will be featured in the curated section of the art fair, titled Global Futures.

Ala Younis: The Quiet Climate Conditions of Abu Dhabi’s Modernist Buildings

On an early visit to Abu Dhabi, sometime in the 2000s, Jordanian artist Ala Younis was shown around the Emirati capital by a colleague. Amid the burgeoning developments, nascent man-made islands and distinctive architecture, she zeroed in on an idiosyncratic aspect of the cityscape - the older, Modernist-inspired apartment and office blocks, in plain minimalist style, that stood out near the ever-changing skyline of steel and glass towers rising in the city.

Her colleague remarked on how quickly the city’s building stock turned over. Years later, having settled in Abu Dhabi herself, Younis understood what her colleague meant. Despite only dating back a few decades, these buildings had already lived through so much change that they felt far older than their years, a sign of just how quickly the city has had to grow to meet the needs of its people. And so, Climate Conditions is a series of intricately tiled works, in homage to these everyday structures, regarded by many today as unremarkable architectural functionaries, the unassuming, anonymous civil servants of the urban landscape.

They are the apartment blocks and municipal offices, the small shopping centres and business suites of the past. They are concrete, with tiled façades, deep-set windows, shaded balconies and brise-soleil. Once confident expressions of a modern future, many now stand alongside newer buildings that draw on advances in architecture and technology from around the world, while the city continues to explore new ways of designing for its climate.

In Climate Conditions, buildings are rendered in hand-cut stone mosaic, their façades in isolation, accompanied by trees and set against pale, largely empty backgrounds. The format lends each structure an unexpected prominence. Buildings that might ordinarily be passed without notice are treated as monuments.

Younis’s fascination with these buildings is partly autobiographical. Trained as an architect, she lived in Abu Dhabi for about three years, and first addressed the subject in a 2025 solo exhibition at The Art Gallery at NYU Abu Dhabi, at the point she was preparing to return home to Amman. “I was thinking,” recalls Younis, “now that I’m going to leave Abu Dhabi, what exactly am I leaving behind? Because some things might look different by the time I come back, like these old buildings, for example”.

Yet Younis’s commemoration of Abu Dhabi’s ageing buildings is not simply nostalgia. These works investigate the city’s deeper social history via its architecture as a physical system. The buildings she portrays were once the future, but today, they have aged and now betray the effect of time, weather and everyday human interactions. They aren’t passive, inert human containers, but almost living beings, absorbing moisture, expanding, contracting, cracking and corroding.

This latter aspect especially fascinated Younis. The UAE has a distinct climatic profile thanks to its position and combination of desert, coastline, mountains and urban settlements. While researching, she discovered a technical manual aimed at the Gulf’s construction industry, detailing how heat and humidity affect reinforced concrete over time, knowledge that has shaped how engineers design and reinforce buildings to withstand the region’s climate.

Younis relates this engineering problem to her own experience of living in Abu Dhabi. “When the sun comes down, you start to hear the cracking, or the sounds of the shrinking of the wood, the metal or the aluminium,” she says. “The elements from which the construction is made are still living forms. They drink water and breathe air and rust and age.”

The title of the series, Climate Conditions, refers not simply to the weather, but to the continual interaction between the building and its environment. Younis notes how the angle of sunshine determines the depth and shape of windows, or how the sporadic Emirati rainstorms impact drainage systems and interior materials designed for a predominantly dry climate.

This also points to the contrast in how Modernist buildings in the Gulf had climate control integral to their design. Younis’s buildings feature recessed windows and projecting elements characteristic of the region, designed to offset the glare and heat of the desert sun. “I was interested in the type of openings that the buildings have,” she says. “By the time the sun comes in, there is a lot of light coming into the rooms, but not so much heat.”

Such details challenge the idea that Modernism was simply imported into the Gulf unchanged. In fact, as Younis’s work demonstrates, the movement was adapted from Western precepts by Arab architects and engineers to meet the needs of residents in rapidly growing Gulf cities.

The trees in Younis’s mosaics introduce another history of movement. Abu Dhabi’s greenery was planted to provide shade, soften heat and break up miles of concrete. Some species are indigenous, others imported. Buildings and their surrounding vegetation consequently share a state of ambiguity. Both have been chosen and positioned within a constructed urban environment. They are also each subject to cycles of growth and decay. In Younis’s newer mosaics, the trees loom larger and the architecture more assertive, reinforcing the sense that these façades are being set apart from the newer towers rising around them.

Younis deliberately chose to render these buildings in mosaic. She’d noticed souvenir panels in her home city of Amman, tiles of Roman and Christian motifs: a tree, a saint or a building, in the centre of a stone field. Drawn to the way the stippled texture gave an almost pointillist dimension to the imagery, she worked with artisans, who built each work by hand from her preparatory sketches. Hundreds of small, hand-cut pieces were used to construct balconies, windows, cladding and trees.

Mosaic is a natural progression from Younis’s earlier paintings, textiles and installations. “My work is always little pieces next to each other, making bigger stories,” she says. Mosaic turns that principle into both image and material, with each individual stone remaining distinct, even as part of a façade.

There is an interesting contradiction here at the heart of Climate Conditions. Mosaic is associated with living through time, and Roman floors have outlasted the buildings that housed them, yet Younis uses it to carry something durable in a different sense: the cracks and variations within the stone become traces of the inner forces these structures have absorbed over time, including weather, use, memory, and the layered experience of the people who passed through them. The mosaic format itself gives each building an iconic presence, one that persists regardless of whether the structure still stands in the same form the previous generation once knew it in.

Younis’s façades stand apart from the city that produced them. They’re fragments of an urban present but is now already very much of the past. By giving these ordinary buildings the scale and composure of monuments, she reminds us that a city’s story is told through the quiet structures that carried its people, seasons and everyday life along the way.