Artists to Watch
Material Thinking

Athar Jaber (b. 1982) approaches marble with both reverence and urgency. Each chisel strike exposes a tension between endurance and vulnerability, as figures emerge only partially freed from their stone. Working in taille directe, he carves Carrara marble by hand, maintaining an unbroken exchange between thought and material. Born in Rome to Iraqi parents and now based in the UAE, Jaber extends classical sculpture into the present, using the body as a vessel through which collective and political histories are inscribed. His recent participation in the Abu Dhabi Public Art Biennale (2024) and his solo exhibition Vestiges at Ayyam Gallery in Dubai (2025) underscore a practice grounded in both technical mastery and human inquiry. Through sculpture, performance, and film, he considers how corporeality endures what time and conflict impose upon it.

Working with film, paper, metal, and organic matter, Toronto-born, New York-based Lotus L. Kang (b. 1985) explores transformation as both process and condition. Her installations are alive to their environments: light-sensitive films darken, greenhouses trap moisture and heat, and metallic surfaces absorb traces of touch and time. Drawing from her Korean heritage and diasporic experience, Kang entwines the personal with the elemental, revealing how materials hold memory. In Already (2025) at Tribeca’s 52 Walker, Kang created an atmosphere responsive to light and temperature, extending her ongoing inquiry into permeability, impermanence, and inheritance. Through these mutable compositions, Kang meditates on how bodies, histories, and environments continually alter one another.