Dubai, UAE: Leila Heller Gallery is pleased to announce award-winning artist Maxi Cohen’s first solo show in the UAE, titled ’The Poetry of Water’, opening in November 2023.
This exhibition, a collection of water art captured in the UAE, includes paintings, large format photographs, multimedia works, immersive installations, and video furniture. In addition, a mixed reality installation will allow you to see your thoughts affect water for the first time.
Maxi Cohen’s engagement with water, as a medium, began in the hot springs in the desert of California, where she became mesmerized by the lush visual abstractions within the water. Thus began a twenty-five year pursuit, filming and photographing rivers, oceans, springs, and waterfalls all around the world…from Argentina to Zambia, Iceland to Antarctica.
Maxi Cohen came to Dubai, during Expo 2020, to learn more about current climate change innovations and issues of global sustainability. In this time of climate change, deserts are expanding all over the globe. As the UAE is 80% desert, innovation in food and water security is crucial. Maxi discovered that the bodies of water in the UAE were none like she had experienced elsewhere in the world. That moment of epiphany presented an irresistible challenge for her as an artist. As she looked and studied, the water showed its beauty in unexpected ways. Maxi Cohen states, “the greatest wonder was photographing in the Jubail Mangrove Park, where, when I arrived, there was no water and hours later, it flooded; an ever-changing landscape devoid of lushness, weirdly different, and ultimately inspiring. As I looked through my camera, the vegetation reminded me of Arabic calligraphy in the fluid way it curved and danced. When I saw the large-scale prints I had made from my photographs, I started to paint on their surfaces, calling on the water spirits to speak through the art.”
As part of her ongoing research into the majesty of water, Maxi has been creating Bio-Responsive art. To create the mixed reality (MR) and bio-resonant art pieces, she is collaborating with the renown team from dArt NYC, founded by William Wong. Wearing an EEG headband, a haptic vest, and an MR headset, viewers will be able to see their own thoughts translated in water. Through electromagnetism, the water in us carries our emotions, affecting our cellular biology – our thoughts altering the gallery of our own body’s cells. These images of the viewers’ experience are then permanently preserved in a digital asset and given to a collector, along with an accompanying art print.
Apart from being a breakthrough in art and science, it is also proof of the connectivity and resonance of the water in us. As our molecular structure is 99% water, through this deep experience - where you, in a sense, are the body of evidence - your reverence for water…for yourself…and nature, will increase.
The collection of works in “The Poetry of Water” introspects what moves the human spirit to act, innovate, and participate in the reality of climate change. Inspiring in us the possibility of being personally resonant, it is Maxi’s hope that through the focus on the art and science of water, including a series of talks at the gallery on Water to Change Your Life, her work not only brings beauty and serenity to people’s environments, but will enrich the health and well-being of the people and the land of the UAE.
In Maxi Cohen’s own words, “Water recovers me. It is where I dive deep, free the mind, and let go of my body. It is the element of creativity, a womb-like return... inner peace, free flowing. May this work be my prayer for peace, for clean water for all. May it bring beauty, calm, and uplift the spirit.”
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Maxi Cohen is an award-winning artist and filmmaker based in New York City. Her films, photographs, and multimedia installations have been exhibited internationally and are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
Her films have influenced two generations of filmmakers, having played in movie theaters, film festivals and on televisions around the world. As a media activist, her film and television work has had significant influence in creating visible social change. Maxi has been supported by grants and awards from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Annenberg Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, The Karan-Weiss Foundation, and most recently The Buckminster Fuller Institute for Design Science, among others. (https://www.maxicohenstudio.com/biography)
For twenty-five years, Maxi has been traveling the world, filming and photographing bodies of water. From these documented images and film footage, she has created and exhibited multi-media works and installations. The latest evolution of Cohen’s reverence for water is A Movement in Water™ an interactive traveling “museum” of water, intended to increase one’s reverence for water, both within oneself and in nature.
Cohen, in collaboration with Gina Bria, founder of the Hydration Foundation, is a knowledge partner with the US State Department - UAE Agricultural Innovation Mission for Climate (AIM), working with 126 countries, NGOs, and entities eager for better water practices. Together with Bria and scientists in Dubai, Cohen developed a program entitled Grow More Food With Less Water, to address food and water insecurity in the UAE.
In New York, Cohen has taught at the NYU Graduate School of Education, the New School, and at Pratt Institute. She has lectured around the world, including at MIT and DIDI.
ABOUT THE GALLERY
Since its establishment over four decades ago in New York, Leila Heller Gallery has gained worldwide recognition as a pioneer in promoting a creative dialogue and exchange between Western artists and Middle Eastern, Central and Southeast Asian artists. The Gallery has garnered a reputation for identifying and cultivating the careers of artists, leaving a lasting impact on contemporary art and culture. Currently representing a diverse roster of Western, Central Asian, Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern artists, the gallery is also active in the American, European, and Middle Eastern secondary art markets. In November 2015, Leila Heller Gallery opened its first international location in Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue. At 16,000 square feet, the art gallery features three exhibition spaces, making it the largest gallery in the UAE, showcasing leading regional and international artists, many of whom will be presenting their work for the first time in the Middle East.
In addition to presenting a dynamic exhibition schedule, Leila Heller Gallery actively organizes shows with world renowned curators, hosts educational panels and film screenings, and produces catalogues and books with scholarly essays. Each year the gallery participates in the major international art fairs and stages off-site projects, as a platform for exploring new conversations, within a wider context of galleries, artists and institutions. Gallery artists have consistently participated in international museum exhibitions and biennials, and are included in leading institutional collections worldwide.
