Artists Oscar Murillo and the duo Allora & Calzadilla are among the participants of the inaugural Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial 2024–2025: Public Matter, an ambitious initiative reimagining public space through contemporary art. The Biennial examines how environment, community, urbanity, and indigeneity shape the concept of public space in the city.
Oscar Murillo presents A 1% Offering: Collective Messages to Our Ancestors (2024), a vast collaborative painting that stretches across 1% of the city’s 8-kilometre Corniche. Referencing Monet’s Water Lilies series and the artist’s struggle with cataracts, Murillo’s work explores the blurred lines between visibility and empathy, suggesting that collective histories and personal struggles often remain unseen. The project becomes a meditative offering, calling on viewers to consider ancestral memory, connection, and shared vulnerability.
In a nearby park, Allora & Calzadilla’s Chalk (2024) merges performance, sculpture, and sound through monumental chalk blocks installed in a public space frequented by children. These massive forms are left open to interaction or contemplation, inviting passersby to engage with the materiality of impermanence, creativity, and play. Whether drawn on, climbed, or left untouched, Chalk encourages spontaneous gestures that emphasize the fleeting nature of shared experiences in public environments.
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