New York University Abu Dhabi Art Gallery

/ Christopher Joshua Benton and Faisal Abdu met in Satwa, one of the older neighborhoods in Dubai, where Benton lived and Abdu worked. One of the older neighborhoods in Dubai, Satwa is a mix of apartments, villas, and low-rise buildings that are home to retail shops and casual eateries.

On one of its unmarked streets is Mubeen Calligraphy, a small advertising company that makes signboards for various businesses, where Abdu creates unique shop front graphics. These signs, easily recognizable for their vibrant colors, can be seen across Dubai, but especially in Satwa, Al Quoz, and Deira.  The designs present an urban archive that interweaves personal and cultural identity, through which one can trace how people imprint themselves on the city. Benton, formerly in advertising himself, has worked with Abdu for several years and states that “working together, wethey connect the street market and the art market, illuminating the invisible mechanisms of labor and production behind the glowing lights and psychedelic graphics.”  

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The proposal is to see these designs as a kind of urban archive that interweaves personal and cultural identity, through which one can trace how people imprint themselves on the city. This work is reflective of the artist’s collaborative practice as well as his celebration of the visual vernacular unique to the UAE, tracing its connections to notions of migration, labor, and consumption. While the lightboxes only highlight a selection from Mubeen Calligraphy’s production, the entirety of Abdu’s designs are accessible via the nearby viewing station.

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Mubeen, City as Archive took its inspiration from Deepak Unnikrishnan’s list poem titled “Pravasis?,” featured in the author’s award-winning novel-in-stories, Temporary People (Restless Books, 2017). The meaning of “pravasi(s)” is close to migrant, with the added connotation of a human who works overseas, or a human who is away. Pravasi has working-class connections and is also close to Pardesi (used in Hindi), which often translates to foreigner. 

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For this installation of Mubeen in the Reading Room, we invited Unnikrishnan, who kindly permitted us to use his words, to weigh in andand thoughtink with us about how the work in the room could be in conversation with his list-poem. Unnikrishnan He felt the room rightfully belonged to Benton and Abdu first, and.  He wanted his words to behave, not intrude. “There are three iterations of pravasis in his book,” he said. They serve as the book’s chorus.  The third iteration, “Pravasis?” uses wordplay about job-like and not-job-like jobs to build a literal edifice on the page. “This final iteration was meant to live and breathe on walls.” To add to the surreal nature of the exchange, he shared that Temporary People was written with color in mind. The result is a collaboration that features the poem in its entirety for the first time, in its original English, as well as Malayalam, from the writer Benyamin’s translation (Eka Books, 2024) translation. The highlighted professions are color coded: Green are the professions on the lightboxes; Pink are people we predict will be in the Reading Room at different timesspace; Blue are the museum staff who built the exhibition; and Yellow are the makers. The lightboxes and the poem render visible the jobs that help cities such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi run—often worked by people whose presence is marked by transience.