Art Dubai 2025, Alserkal Art Week: How the city turned into a gallery
Inside the raw, industrial space of Concrete in Dubai's Alserkal Avenue, Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi's Vanishing Points unfolds like a handwoven story. The work, made from dyed nylon rope, stretches from floor to ceiling — part installation, part manuscript. It draws on the tradition of charpai weaving, once a household craft in South Asia, which is now disappearing. 'It's vanishing slowly with time in this age of technology and science,' Qureshi said. With this piece, he hopes to keep that memory alive — one knot at a time.
The installation is massive — spanning more than 30 metres overhead — and the colour palette pulses with repetition: red, yellow, red, blue. From inside, the piece looks out onto the Alserkal lawn, where people line up outside coffee shops and concept stores, beverages in hand. Just beneath the tapestry of ropes, near a wall lined with woven panels in the same tones, Qureshi has placed a few charpai chairs. You can sit. Look up. It's quiet here — deliberately so. He gives you space to pause, rest, and remember the kind of craftsmanship that once lived in homes, now reimagined in a space built for looking, thinking, and maybe holding on.
He built Vanishing Points like a manuscript, stitched across the air. Each panel has its own frame and uneven border, like the layout of an Islamic miniature. In the middle: repeating sky patterns dotted with stars. One side is red with blue stars, the other blue with red. 'They look very similar, but they are not,' he said. The patterns pull from tradition, but the palette — drawn loosely from the colours of the American flag — carries quiet commentary. He's not interested in prescribing meaning. 'Everyone has their own way of looking,' he added. 'The work has many, many layers.'
In the inbetween
That idea — of art responding to place, not just existing in it — also runs through Between a Beach and a Slope, Alserkal Avenue's public art commission curated by Fatoş Üstek. 'Alserkal is situated in a liminal space,' she said. 'It lies between contrasting geographies — beach and slope, desert and skyline. That in-betweenness isn't just physical; it resonates metaphorically.'
Shilpa Gupta's Still They Know Not What I Dream is a large light sculpture featuring the reversed phrase: 'Still they know not what I dream.' Displayed in glowing text and flipped backward, the words are deliberately difficult to read, forcing viewers to slow down and decipher them. This intentional distortion mirrors the ways voices — especially dissenting or marginalised ones — are often silenced, misunderstood, or hidden in plain sight. For Üstek, the avenue's openness to experimentation and refusal to conform to traditional institutional models made it the right site for a project built around movement, ambiguity, and public encounter. 'The avenue allows for a more porous form of engagement,' she said. 'People encounter the works as part of their daily rhythm. That creates a different kind of intimacy — one rooted in chance and discovery.'
People encounter the works as part of their daily rhythm. That creates a different kind of intimacy — one rooted in chance and discovery"
Fatoş üStek
As someone who's worked internationally across formats and cities, Üstek sees the UAE's evolving art scene as both promising and at a turning point. 'There are so many artists here whose practices resist categorisation,' she said. 'They deserve platforms that match their complexity.' For her, curators in the region have a role to play not just in presenting what's visible, but in surfacing what has long been overlooked — stories shaped by migration, indigenous knowledge, and ways of making that fall outside dominant frames.
That same complexity — rooted in displacement, memory, and motion — threads through Iranian artist Hadieh Shafie's work.
In her first solo presentation in Dubai, Shafie brings time, memory, and language into orbit through Resonant Turns, a series of hand-cut, layered works that blur drawing, photography, and text. 'The core of my work has to do with the passage of time,' she said. In the Sapphire series, she layers Farsi script onto a cotton museum board, then cuts and twists the material into circles — creating whirlpools of colour, poetry, and motion. 'It's akin to throwing stones on water,' she explained. Her own image appears for the first time in one drawing, meeting the viewer with what she calls a 'soft, aggressive' gaze. Infused with fragments of poetry and childhood memories of drawing grass during wartime in Iran, the work is deeply personal yet open-ended — rooted in place, but always moving. Now, Shafie is based in New York city. But during her visit to the UAE, she said: 'I feel like I'm the closest I've ever been to the motherland…We have borders, but I feel like I am from here.'
This year's Alserkal Art Week runs under the theme 'a wild stitch' — a fitting phrase for a region where artists are constantly threading together memory, identity, and place in ways that feel both personal and political. But it's not just about what's on the walls. Across the UAE, art is being backed — not just shown. Alserkal continues to anchor the grassroots side of things, while Art Dubai has grown into a heavyweight on the global fair circuit, bringing in more than 120 galleries and platforming voices from the Global South. Together, they reflect a bigger shift. Dubai isn't just a stop on the art map anymore. It's shaping the terms — blending local textures with global momentum and building a scene on its own terms.
And that shift isn't just aesthetic — it's structural. Dubai Culture has rolled out new funding models to help local galleries show up on the global circuit, while programmes like Campus Art Dubai — part mentorship, part hands-on training — and the Dubai Collection — the city's first public art archive — focus on building talent and memory at home. These aren't side projects. They're part of a bigger push to make culture stick. In 2024, Dubai Culture launched a grant covering half the cost for galleries showing at international fairs — a clear signal of where the city's placing its bets. And the return is real: Art Dubai 2023 brought in Dh143 million in direct economic impact. This isn't just about soft power anymore — it's business.
This April is a test for artists and curators in the region — and some are making the most of it, showing work across both Art Dubai and Alserkal Art Week.
At Art Week, Dastan Gallery and Parallel Circuit teamed up with Zaal Art Gallery and Leila Heller Gallery for a collaborative show titled Maydan: A Living Agora, curated by Behrang Samadzadegan. Set inside Alserkal's A1 space, the show pulls together artists who are thinking about what it means to share space — not just physically but also socially and conceptually. The 'maydan' (gathering space) here isn't a metaphor. It's built into the structure: a room for exchange, disagreement, and reflection. Some works lean heavily on narrative, others play with form, but all of them sit within that same tension — how we gather, and what we carry into those gatherings.
At Art Dubai, Dastan Gallery is showing in both the Contemporary and Bawwaba sections — offering two different but connected views into its orbit. In the Contemporary section, the gallery presents a wide mix of works by artists it has shown over the years, from established names to younger voices. The setup shifts throughout the week, allowing the booth to evolve — less static showcase, more living archive. Over in Bawwaba, Parallel Circuit is showing a solo presentation of Mohammad Piryaee. His sculptures look like they've been pulled from a buried past. Paired with his fragile monument-like drawings, the work sits squarely in this year's curatorial theme: finding common ground through memory in a time of dislocation.
If art in the UAE is changing — getting bigger, more visible, and more professionalised — Crit Club is where that change gets tested. Held inside Jossa by Alserkal, one performance-based talk series turned public critique into something closer to live theatre: unscripted, tense, sometimes funny, and often messy by design. At the start of each session, the audience was asked the night's core question — yes or no — and the room, packed wall to wall, would raise their hands.
Conceived by Cem A., an artist with a background in anthropology and the mind behind the art meme page
@freeze_magazine, Crit Club intentionally departs from the polished format of traditional panel talks. 'This is a vulnerable format and kind of untenable,' he said. The idea was to artificially create a space for real disagreement, even if it's performative. Each conversation was part debate, part staged confrontation, and part genuine inquiry into where the art world stands now.
While much of April is about visibility — fairs, openings, polished booths — Crit Club pointed to something deeper: an art scene learning how to think out loud. As the UAE's art world grows more public and more professional, spaces like this feel increasingly necessary — not to present the scene, but to shape it.
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