Frieze Abu Dhabi

Light moves in empty space, but can only be felt in an entangled world — it is gathered, withheld, and remembered in traces, in fleeting images. At our booth, five artists catch, bend, and question light, from the shadow of a roadside weed to the moving arc of the Sun, or the vanishing echo of a distant star.

A mysterious light flickers in Soumya Netrabile’s paintings: weeds sprout unexpectedly, forms surface and recede at a measured, slow pace. Meanwhile, Amitesh Shrivastava’s large-scale four panel canvas navigates the stillness of light against the shifting and breathing ground of a forest — what lies buried beneath, a mammoth or memory?

Around the corner, Neha Choksi and Rohini Devasher build a visceral encounter with our nearest star — leaving viewers to tarry with its spectral, material relics. Choksi’s bronze sculptures imagine the sun as a body, its rays towering, truncated, and held in a trance. Devasher explores solarigraphy — transforming an ordinary can into an instrument of planetary scale. With long exposure, her Luminous Archives trace the glowing arc of the Sun across a strange sky.

Nearby, Raqs Media Collective’s LED light box sequences an encounter between a human eye and a distant star — for when you see the starlight, we bear witness the paradox of vision: where the light (or its trace) might be alive, but not the star itself.