THIS IS A TIME FOR RENEWAL
We are opening to a new time.
Every now and again we must renew
Ourselves as a museum,
As a vision, as a people.
This is a time for renewal.
Time to dream higher.
Opening a new way into the future:
Culture needs dialogue;
Civilisation needs community.
What does it mean to be human?
Art renews what it is to be human.
It celebrates the spirit of surprise
We celebrate art as healing,
Reconciling us to ourselves
We celebrate our rich variousness,
We celebrate the beauty of differences,
We celebrate the resilience of the human.
We work with the stuff of wonder.
Art is a dream of truth.
To renew the heart is our dream
To touch the place of tears and joy
To catch a vision of hope with a gaze
To re-imagine our journey
from birth to the stars
To lift our spirits in play and beauty
To collaborate with what is
extraordinary in you.
What does it mean to be human?
It means to love, to dream,
To make, to laugh, to grow,
To quest, to find meaning,
To inspire and be inspired,
To transform the ordinary,
To heal our restless hearts
In the fountains of art and culture;
To lift ourselves up
with the magic of unity.
The human story sings here,
dreams here, In magnificence.
Artworks Credits
Guanyin, Bodhisattva of Compassion, Jin or Northern Song dynasty, China, Shanxi province, 1050-1150, Carved, painted and gilded wood, Louvre Abu Dhabi | Monumental statue with two heads, Jordan, Ain Ghazal, About 6500 BCE, Plaster, bitumen (eyes), Department of Antiquities of Jordan | Ramesses II, pharaoh of Egypt, Egyptian civilization, Egypt, Tanis, 1279–1213 BCE, Diorite, Musée du Louvre | Ancestor figure, Djennenke or Soninke culture, Mali, 1200–1300, Wood, Louvre Abu Dhabi | Head of a young man: Study of the Figure of Christ, Holland, Amsterdam, 1648–56, Rembrandt van Rijn (Leiden, 1606–Amsterdam, 1669), Oil on panel, Louvre Abu Dhabi | William and Penelope Welby Playing Chess, United Kingdom, 1769, Francis Cotes (London, 1726–Richmond, 1770), Oil on canvas, Louvre Abu Dhabi | Octagonal fountain and its flooring, Syria, Damascus, 1700–1800, Marble, limestone, slate, Louvre Abu Dhabi | The Bohemian, Édouard Manet, France, Paris, 1861–1862 (cut out in 1867), Oil on canvas, Louvre Abu Dhabi | Young Emir Studying, Osman Hamdy Bey,Turkey, Istanbul (?), 1878, Oil on canvas, Louvre Abu Dhabi | Children Wrestling, Paul Gauguin, France, Pont-Aven, 1888, Oil on canvas, Louvre Abu Dhabi | Composition with Blue, Red, Yellow and Black, Piet Mondrian, France, Paris, 1922, Oil on canvas, Louvre Abu Dhabi | Chirisei Kyubiki © 1960 Kazuo Shiraga, Japan, 1960, Oil on canvas, Louvre Abu Dhabi | Architectural frieze carved with Quranic verses, Ghurid empire, Northern India, Rajasthan (?), About 1200, Sandstone, Louvre Abu Dhabi | Propagation (Germination series), 2016, Giuseppe Penone, Cité de la céramique, Sèvres and Limoges, France, 2016, Drawing on porcelain tiles, Commissioned by, Louvre Abu Dhabi | For the Louvre Abu Dhabi 03, 2017 © 2021 Jenny Holzer, member Artist Rights Society (NY), United States of America, New York, Limestone relief of three pages printed and annotated in French, from the “Bordeaux Copy”of Essais by Michel de Montaigne, Marble, Commissioned by Louvre Abu Dhabi | Augustus, the first Roman emperor, Italy, Rome (?), 27 BCE–100 CE, Marble, Louvre Abu Dhabi | For the Louvre Abu Dhabi 02, 2017 © 2021 Jenny Holzer, member Artist Rights Society (NY), United States of America, New York, Limestone relief of three pages with Arabic script from the manuscript Al-Muqaddimah by Ibn Khaldun, a 14th-century Islamic treatise on the writing of history, Commissioned by Louvre Abu Dhabi
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