Patterns of Uncertainty is a group exhibition that brings together UAE based artists working across diverse media and approaches, connected through shared sensibilities around repetition, memory, adaptation, and relation.

Within the shared works reflect a condition of continuing to create without clarity or fixed outcomes. Instability is approached as a baseline of contemporary life, where identities shift, structures rarely hold, and meaning remains in flux.

Across the exhibition, gestures repeat and fracture, forms appear and dissolve, and materials register traces of both control and collapse. The works move between order and disintegration, care and fatigue, presence and disappearance, revealing patterns that emerge through persistence, variation, and response.

Featuring works by Hala El Abora, Arnold Barretto, Yohan Chavez, Nadin El Dib, Mivan Makia, Moza Al Mazrouei, Nada Meshal, Yoonsik Chico Park, and Martin Ong Yambao and the exhibition spans video and sound, installation, painting, sculpture, textile, photography, and mixed media practices.
Read curatorial statement

Patterns of Uncertainty was presented from May 10 - June 7, 2026 at Satellite, Alserkal Avenue,
curated by Relic Suspension, led by Assi Abogado and Nathaniel Enriquez.

Yohan Chavez
Sudden Death / A Tragic Memory / My Truth 2024
Oil paint, spray paint on canvas
Courtesy of the artist

Sudden Death / A Tragic Memory / My Truth is a series of mixed-media assemblages that examines grief through the instability of memory.

The works move between tenderness and death, where moments of intimacy exist alongside absence. Organic forms and fractured surfaces suggest traces of what remains, reflecting how memories repeat and gradually lose clarity over time.

Mivan Makia
American Dream 2026
Archival ink and colored markers on paper
Courtesy of the artist

American Dream draws from scenes in the reality show My Strange Addiction, where private compulsions are transformed into public spectacle.

Removed from the logic of television, these characters appear less as exceptions and more as symptoms of a culture built on excess, desire, and performance. Playful on the surface and uneasy underneath, American Dream considers how the compulsions presented in the show mirror the compulsions of media culture itself: to consume, to judge, to repeat, and above all, to keep looking.

Arnold Barretto
Portrait of Mai 2026
20-rupee note
Courtesy of the artist

The frame is positioned lower, asking audiences to crouch and meet the work at a child’s eye level. In doing so, the gesture draws the viewer closer to the artist’s own memory of mai, while reconsidering what it means to make a portrait: whether a person is held through their image, or through the objects and gestures that continue to carry their essence.

Moza Al Mazrouei
ft. Finance Bros
Smoke Fair 2026
Framed photographic print on paper and drawings, shisha
Site-specific installation
Courtesy of the artist

An excerpt from the work: He got into finance to conceal his video game addiction by `monitoring the market.' He is 19 years old, the eldest of 3. He intended to pursue an unpaid internship at the World Shisha convention as a photographer, planning his first business model around tobacco.

His research so far follows business advice from an automated voice that rewards him with responses, one search at a time, and more broadly on-the ground observations.

Hala El Abora
Consequence of Circumstance 2025
Steel
Courtesy of the artist

Yoonsik Chico Park
Elephant in the Room 2025
3 ceramic pieces,burning incense, ____ slabs, lit table lamp
Courtesy of the artist

Snapshot from the opening, May 10, 2026.

Martin Ong Yambao
Liminal Cosmos 2025
Acrylic, oil pastel, spray paint,
pigment ink on mesh and canvas
Courtesy of the artist

This body of work begins with undeveloped disposable cameras found in thrift shops—discarded memory-preservers transformed into vessels of loss, absence, and fragmented remembrance through misregistration, blurring, and erasure. Extending the artist’s engagement with postmemory, these ghostly distortions protect identities while questioning impermanence, reinterpretation, authorship, and the ethics of looking.

Nadin El Dib
Chrysalis 2026
Mixed fibres
Courtesy of the artist

Chrysalis explores cyclical repetition and the mechanical pursuit of an ideal, where the fixation on formal perfection subsumes the original work and transforms its fiber-mesh prototypes into the work itself. Existing in limbo between prototype and completion, what remains is a field of remnants, a perpetual rehearsal in which gesture and intention fold back into one another.

Nada Meshal
Little Grief 2025
Single-channel video

Surgical Steel 2026
Steel wire, found bone
Courtesy of the artist

Snapshot from the opening, May 10, 2026.

With deep gratitude to everyone who came through Patterns of Uncertainty.
We’re beyond grateful for the care and presence that continued to shape the exhibition beyond the works themselves.

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