Artists from the Arab world will relate: they are often asked what their work says about where they come from. And that question can carry an assumption that the work should somehow speak for a place, a culture or a political context — whether through migration, colonial history or a recognisably “Arab” visual language.

But what if the artist just wants to make work about... water?

This October, two performances at The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi look at Arab identity from very different angles. Youness Atbane’s Untitled 14km picks apart the way museums, curators and the wider art world construct ideas of Arab identity. Fouad Boussouf’s Näss (People) takes another route entirely, looking at what identity can become when it moves through music, memory and the body.

One starts with the question: who gets to define an Arab artist? The other seems to ask: what if identity doesn’t need a definition at all?

On October 1 and 2, Moroccan artist Youness Atbane brings Untitled 14km to The Arts Center. The performance unfolds inside an imaginary museum dedicated to contemporary art from North Africa and the Middle East, where an artist, a curator, a museum director and an Arab-Andalusian poet are brought together to create an exhibition. What starts as a project around modernism, Arab history and contemporary art gradually becomes a way of looking at who gets to frame culture, whose interpretation carries authority, and what happens when identity starts shaping how an artwork is expected to be read.

That expectation is one of the main things Atbane pushes against. He gives a simple example: a French or German artist can make a project about water and have it read as poetic, conceptual, ecological or abstract. If he makes one, the conversation may quickly shift towards drought in Morocco, migration, the Mediterranean, colonial history or geopolitics.

Atbane describes this as a subtler form of Orientalism — one that does not necessarily rely on obvious stereotypes, but can still appear through institutional expectations.

Untitled 14km turns those structures into characters. The museum director represents the contemporary institution and its authority, while the curator sits between the institution and the artist, translating one to the other. The artist is left negotiating both.

The Arab-Andalusian poet introduces a different historical perspective. For Atbane, the figure points towards a period associated with poetry, philosophy, science and artistic production that contributed to a wider intellectual culture.

The curator, in particular, occupies an in-between position — often coming from the region while being shaped professionally by Western institutions. The artist then becomes the person trying to understand where they stand inside that system.

Atbane approaches these questions through satire. For him, humour makes it possible to talk about power, museums and representation without turning the performance into a direct accusation.

Performance also makes these structures physical. Authority is no longer an abstract idea: someone speaks, someone listens, someone translates, someone waits to be validated.

But Atbane is not interested in replacing one definition of Arab identity with another.

For him, identity is already shaped by several languages, histories, political systems and cultural spaces. Different parts of it are emphasised at different moments, depending on the context.

Rather than proposing a new fixed image of Arab identity, Untitled 14km is more interested in making existing definitions less stable.

Later in the month, choreographer Fouad Boussouf brings Näss to The Arts Center on October 30.

The work takes a different approach. Näss, meaning “people”, is performed by seven dancers and brings contemporary hip hop together with North African musical traditions. One of its key references is the Moroccan group Nass El Ghiwane, whose music became highly influential in the 1970s.

Boussouf was drawn not only to their sound, but to the way their music connected older traditions with the social reality around them. Their lyrics spoke to the concerns of their time while drawing on forms and rhythms with much older roots. He saw a parallel with hip hop, which also developed as a contemporary language shaped by community, rhythm and a search for identity and roots.

That connection becomes physical in Näss. Each of the seven dancers brings his own technique and movement language, but much of the choreography is about what happens when those individual bodies start operating as a group. They confront one another, fall into shared rhythms, separate and come together again, with the energy constantly shifting between the individual and the collective.

The work was also shaped by time the company spent rehearsing in Morocco, where Boussouf looked for the rhythm and atmosphere that would eventually run through the piece. The result is not an attempt to reproduce a traditional Moroccan dance form. Hip hop remains central to Boussouf’s choreographic language, while North African rhythms and references are folded into something contemporary, physical and at times almost trance-like.

This is where Näss approaches identity differently from Untitled 14km. Atbane focuses on the categories through which Arab artists are interpreted. Boussouf is interested in what happens when cultural memory is put back into motion: when something inherited can be used, changed and mixed with a form that emerged somewhere else.

Even the title points towards the collective: Näss means “people.” Rather than presenting identity as a set of symbols, the piece locates it in bodies moving together — carrying different influences without needing to resolve them into a single style.