What We Left in the Sandbox: Two Emirati women reimagine childhood through art in Abu Dhabi

Abu Dhabi: Somewhere in your childhood there is a white plastic chair.

It sat on a balcony, in a garden, at the edge of a beach. It was meant for sitting, but you probably never sat on it properly. You stacked it, tipped it over, and turned it into a den, a boat or a throne. If you were unlucky, it snapped under you.

Reem Al Mubarak's exhibition 'What We Left in the Sandbox', those chairs come back, cast in aluminum and hung on the wall. Step close and your own face appears in the metal, looking back at you from inside the memory.

“When you’re closer, your reflection becomes part of the work,” Reem said. “When people interact, they see themselves in it, quite literally.”

That is the spirit of the whole show. Presented at Rizq Art Initiative in Abu Dhabi, it is the work of Reem Al Mubarak, an Emirati artist, author who grew up in the city, and it is curated by Emirati architect and researcher Azza Aboualam.

The exhibition explores how the act of remembering can be a powerful medium of creativity.

Reem Al Mubarak presents pieces that experiment with materiality and play to tap into her childhood memories of forgotten places and objects, and in turn invite visitors to reflect on their own lived experiences. At their core, the works consider memory as an unreliable and shifting material.

Memory is made out of sand

It asks what memory is made of: what stays, what fades, and what quietly changes while no one is looking.

Walk in and the room has been hung like a playground. Small sand houses sway from thick white ropes like swings.

Foil sheets pressed with plastic chairs catch the light and your reflection. Bubble wrap carries a single popped line where a bike once crossed it.

A metal puzzle will never be completed, torn panels carry poems that stop mid-sentence, and a golden house stands at the centre, large enough to walk inside.

Her answer to what memory is made of is; sand.

Before developing the sand into art, she spent a year researching the science of it, travelling across the UAE to collect samples and examine them under a microscope. She studied how sand forms, oxidises and binds together. The findings are reflected in the exhibition’s palette, with pale, bright tones from Saadiyat, iron-rich reds from Al Ain and softer yellows from Abu Dhabi.

As a girl, Reem picked up a stone from every place she visited, and she has never known why. She keeps a cabinet full of them. To understand how rocks form, she broke them apart. “I realized they’re all based on sand. A single grain is tiny in size, but mighty.”

Memory is made of grains too. Small, scattered, easily carried off by the tide.

So, she built the house again, as a castle of sand you can walk inside. It rises taller than any real home, its walls too high, its windows far out of reach. Her parents tell her the door was never that big. But a child does not measure a door in centimeters.

A child measures it in wonder, and this is the house as it's whole body remembers it. Step in and the windows sit at the height of a small girl straining to see out. For a moment, you are looking through her eyes, and you remember how large everything once was, and how safe it felt to be small inside it.

She knows it is wrong. That is the point. “Everything you see is not the actual house. It’s a distortion of my own interpretation.

Collective memory, play and nostalgia

A memory is not something you keep. It is something you make, again and again, a little differently each time, until the version you made becomes the one you have.

“Memory is always subjective. You can never really reconstruct it in full, and even once you do, how do you know that was the reality?” Azza said.

Reem studied visual arts and began her art career in 2017. This is her second solo exhibition and her largest to date. It began as a conversation in December 2024 and took a year to bring to life.

Asked to describe the show in three words, she answers without hesitation: “Collective memory, play, a little bit of nostalgia.”

Everyone's sandbox

The first of those words is already in the title.

“The we is every single person who comes in and relates to the space. As much as it’s mine, it is equally or even more for the audience.”

The sandbox is the image she chose because it belongs to everyone: a place where we all played, left our toys behind, and where they quietly stayed.

Please touch

For Azza, who designed the space, this is where play comes in. She approached the show as an architect and deliberately gave the room no fixed route. “The viewer is a player in Reem’s playground. Everyone has a memory of bubble wrap as a child.”

The chairs work the same way. “They never really end up as chairs. They end up as toys in the playground.”

She also loves how the show breaks the oldest rule of the gallery.

“There’s always a sense where artwork is so sacred. It’s on the walls, you don’t touch it. But here, we are invited to go into the spaces, to touch the sand, to play with the artwork.”

The metal puzzle is the clearest example. It is heavy, and you need some strength to shift its pieces. It depicts a moment from Reem’s childhood with her grandfather, but the picture can never be completed. Just like how our memories can never be whole.

When she first saw it assembled in the gallery, she was overcome. “I made a toy that’s an artwork. I did not know that it was possible.”

Play is a big element

Play has its tender side too. On the first sand board, two opponents block each other until nobody wins in a game of Tic-Tac-Toe. The second records a game with her nine-year-old niece.

“The second we started playing, I knew I wanted her to win. There is that sensitivity of a child. You never want to break their heart.” Reem said.

In English the piece reads “I used to play to win”. In Arabic it says, that it is now her turn to lose.

“That shows you how I had a beautiful childhood,” she adds, “because someone else once made me win, and it made me excited about that.”

Lost in translation

Language is another kind of play. Reem’s titles are bilingual but never literal. The chair series is called “We Never Used Them Properly” in English, while the Arabic means, roughly, the chair was a toy.

“The show is a little bit of a mind game,” she says. “I give you enough but never truly reveal.”

Art season, close to home

The show opens 6 November to 10 January 2027 in Abu Dhabi's Rizq Art Initiative.

Both women feel the moment.

“It’s two Emirati women representing the art scene at the moment. It makes me feel proud, and hopeful for the future.” Azza said and Reem hopes the work makes her country proud too.

Rooted as it is in Abu Dhabi’s beaches, farms and family homes, the show travels easily.

“As adults, we’re always forced to be a specific way. You go to work, you go to the gym, you have the role of a parent, a sibling. But it’s important to remember that curious, childlike nature we should not lose touch with.”