Jameel Arts Centre plants a salt marsh garden by a Korean art collective
Amphibious Timelapse, by South Korea's Rice Brewing Sisters Club, opens in the centre's Artist's Garden on 7 November and stays for almost two years.
Jameel Arts Centre on Dubai's Jaddaf Waterfront opens a new Artist's Garden on Saturday 7 November. Called Amphibious Timelapse, it is the work of the Rice Brewing Sisters Club, an artist collective from South Korea, and it will stay in place until 27 September 2028.
The garden is about the plants that live where land meets sea. Mangroves and other halophytes, the plants that cope with salty soil, are at its centre, and salt is treated as the thread that ties the desert to the shore. The centre describes the project as a garden, a laboratory and a kitchen at once, built around the question of how "amphibious" living things are connected. Sabkhas, salt marshes and tidal flats, familiar sights along the UAE coast, are presented as one continuous landscape rather than a border between two worlds.
The Rice Brewing Sisters Club was founded in 2018. Its members work with what they call social fermentation, mixing visual art, performance, writing, oral history and what the collective calls auntie's wisdom. Their projects usually ask visitors to take part, and this one is no exception: besides the planting, there will be installations, text and image pieces, and kits that let visitors join in.
The science side comes from the region. The International Center for Biosaline Agriculture, the Dubai-based research body that studies farming with salty water and dry soil, is the project's scientific adviser. The work is curated by Indranjan Banerjee and Daniya Jawwad and supported by The Korea Foundation.
The Artist's Garden is a long-running commission at the centre. It follows Samur by the Chinese artist Zheng Bo, which ran from February 2023 to September 2025, and an earlier garden by Sunoj D and Namrata Neog.
The garden is open to the public 24 hours a day, so it can be visited outside gallery hours. The galleries inside open from 10am to 8pm, and on Fridays from noon, and are closed on Tuesdays. The centre is on the Jaddaf Waterfront, next to its sculpture park, and its website lists the talks and workshops that will run alongside the garden.