Bridging the Rift: a curatorial open call
The Red Sea is a body of water defined by dualities—geographical, cultural, and historical. It is both a bridge and a boundary, connecting continents while separating them, facilitating trade while demarcating divisions, offering sustenance while embodying peril. Bridging the Rift explores these contradictions through contemporary artistic interpretations, using the Red Sea as both a subject and a metaphor.
The works in this exhibition engage with the sea’s liminal nature: as a passageway for movement and migration, a witness to histories both ancient and ongoing, and a shifting threshold between land and water, known and unknown. Through painting, sculpture, video, and installation, the artists interrogate the tension between separation and connection, displacement and belonging, memory and transformation. Some works evoke the sea as a site of historical encounters—commercial, colonial, and spiritual—while others reflect on its ecological fragility, where environmental concerns mirror broader anxieties about division and unity.
By navigating the conceptual rift of the Red Sea, Bridging the Rift invites viewers to reconsider borders—not as rigid delineations, but as fluid, evolving spaces of exchange. In doing so, the exhibition illuminates how art can reimagine divisions, revealing the interwoven histories, cultures, and futures that meet upon these shifting shores.
The works in this exhibition engage with the sea’s liminal nature: as a passageway for movement and migration, a witness to histories both ancient and ongoing, and a shifting threshold between land and water, known and unknown. Through painting, sculpture, video, and installation, the artists interrogate the tension between separation and connection, displacement and belonging, memory and transformation. Some works evoke the sea as a site of historical encounters—commercial, colonial, and spiritual—while others reflect on its ecological fragility, where environmental concerns mirror broader anxieties about division and unity.
By navigating the conceptual rift of the Red Sea, Bridging the Rift invites viewers to reconsider borders—not as rigid delineations, but as fluid, evolving spaces of exchange. In doing so, the exhibition illuminates how art can reimagine divisions, revealing the interwoven histories, cultures, and futures that meet upon these shifting shores.