Today's Edition
KHALED AL KHAWALDEH (ABU DHABI)
Growing up in Abu Dhabi as a child, Takashi Kudo would sit in the dunes of the Arabian desert. Scooping sand and pouring it slowly out of his hands, Takashi remembers how he marvelled at the gentle refraction of light through the grains of sediment.
Years later, as an employee of TeamLab — a Japanese art collective known for their mind-bending installations around the world — Takashi shared this childhood story with an Emirati man, who sat next to him at a cultural summit in Abu Dhabi. That moment, he recalled, inspired his light-bending work as an artist.
That man turned out to be Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak, now Chairman of the Department of Culture and Tourism of Abu Dhabi, and that conversation had set in motion a series of events that culminated in the opening of a first-of-its-kind permanent installation on the shores of the Arabian Gulf.
“He was sitting right next to me, and he's a cool-looking dude, you know, so we started talking. He told me, ‘I work at TeamLab; it's good to be back home’,” Mubarak recalled during a media briefing ahead of the much-anticipated TeamLab’s Phenomena opening in Abu Dhabi on Friday.
“I was confused, what do you mean ‘when you're back home’? I thought you were from Japan. He then told me that he had lived in Abu Dhabi and his father had worked in an oil company here. He said much of his creative mindset had been inspired by his very early visits to the deserts in Al Dhafra.”
Following the conversation, Mubarak ended up flying to Tokyo, where he met TeamLab’s founder Toshiyuki Inoko, and toured the famed Japanese exhibitions. Blown away by the almost hallucinogenic experience, Mubarak and the team at DCT approached TeamLab to bring the concept to Abu Dhabi.
“I told them that here in Abu Dhabi we don’t like to do things easy. The easy thing is to just move the exhibition here, temporarily or permanently,” he said.
“But that's an easy way out. So, we sat down with them and said let's do something different. Let's create something together from scratch. Let's do something where your ideas aren't basically held down because of space.”
“Their eyes sort opened up with excitement, and then we started working with them to create something that could ignite curiosity — and from there, it evolved and evolved and evolved, and we came to Phenomena.”
Inside the Museum with Dozens of Rooms
Nearly a decade in the making, the TeamLab’s Phenomena exhibition is set to open to the public on April 18, joining a growing list of cultural institutions on Saadiyat Island, which is quickly becoming a cultural hub in the Middle East.
The art museum has dozens of rooms, each containing expertly crafted installations that use light, water, space and even taste to transfer guests to an other-worldly, sci-fi reality.
For Inoko, the space is all about creating a place that mimics, abstracts and explores nature in a way that is both awe-inspiring as well as provoking. He said the different exhibitions were all designed with interactive elements to instil a sense in the visitor that they were part of the artwork, rather than just passing through it.
“This concept is something that we call environmental phenomena. So, the environment produces various phenomena, and then those phenomena are the artworks themselves,” Inoko told Aletihad.
“We were interested in a different way of making from that of how people have created things so far, and transcending the conventional notions that people have towards objects. Whether that be by having ambiguous boundaries or this idea that even if people enter an artwork and break it apart, it repairs itself.”
What’s In Store for Visitors
The rooms include a Blade Runner-esque black hole, known as “the void”; a semi-submerged cloud room; and an interactive light garden where children can scan their drawings and watch them dart across the room moments later.
Every space draws on elements from the natural world; using projectors, handcrafted sculptures and technology to create a space that is somehow simultaneously terrestrial but earthly.
“The artworks are all related. They're interconnected. So, they move into various rooms, they overlap, they intersect, they influence each other,” Inoko said.
“Truly, everything is connected and continuously changing. So, the space has a relation with yourself, but also other people in the space.”
