The Artist’s Garden

The Artist’s Garden is a space for artists to create, cultivate and experiment. Collaborative and dynamic in nature, the mission of the Artist’s Garden is to test the conceptual limits of the definition of a ‘garden’ through a research-led commissioning process that responds to local and regional environmental concerns. The Artist’s Garden is accessible to the public 24 hours a day.

Amphibious Timelapse
Rice Brewing Sisters Club
7 November 2026 – 27 September 2028

Amphibious Timelapse by South Korean collective the Rice Brewing Sisters Club (RBSC) is the 2026-2028 Artist’s Garden commission. RBSC is an artist collective established in 2018 exploring the notion of ‘social fermentation’ as an artistic form and work across visual art, performance, writing, oral history, ecological thinking and ‘auntie’s wisdom’. Experimental and participatory by design, their practice builds relationships across human and non-human worlds and across past, present and future, toward shared futures.

Amphibious Timelapse traces a continuum between land and sea. Its guiding question “how are amphibious beings interconnected?” directs attention to the plants at the soil–sea interface. Plants such as mangroves and other halophytes resist any firm division between earth and sea. Here, salt is the connective tissue. Sabkhas, salt marshes and tidal flats are understood not as boundaries but as continuums — the shared medium through which the meeting of soil and sea is sustained, negotiated and made legible.

Structured over two years, Amphibious Timelapse unfolds across phases, functioning as a garden, a lab and a kitchen that is home to local species of halophytes. These plants embody different tactics of living with, rather than against, arid saline soil and salty coastal wetlands that define UAE’s distinctive ecology. Through them, RBSC traces amphibious adaptability, resilience and kinship with their salty landscapes. The project is developed with researchers and specialists of agriculture in saline and arid environments. Narrative and annotative works across text and image, installations and audience-participation kits score the garden, reorganising the categories of land and sea into an amphibious taxonomy.

Curated by Daniya Jawwad and Indranjan Banerjee.