Every November, Alserkal Avenue transforms into one of the region’s richest concentrations of contemporary visual culture — a week where new exhibitions, commissions, performances and conversations unfurl across warehouses, courtyards, and studios. This year, Art Week takes place from November 16 to 23, framed by the thematic lens Uprooted, a call to consider resilience, re-routing, and regeneration in times of global displacement and ecological fragility.

At Waddington Custot, the fourth chapter of Nick Brandt’s monumental project, The Day May Break, unfolds under the title The Echo of Our Voices. Photographed in Jordan — one of the most water-scarce countries in the world — this chapter focuses on refugee families who fled the war in Syria and continue to experience displacement shaped by the changing climate.

Brandt’s visual language shifts here: the families are positioned atop stacked boxes, rising like improvised pedestals. This upward gesture becomes a metaphor for defiance, a symbolic elevation of lives too often unseen. The series as a whole — spanning Zimbabwe, Kenya, Bolivia, and the South Pacific — pairs humans and long-term rescued animals within shared frames, forming quiet portraits of coexistence amid environmental collapse.

Photographic historian Philip Prodger has described the series as “a landmark body of work by one of photography’s great environmental champions,” pushing viewers to confront the lived consequences of climate change.

The result is a portrait not only of the families depicted, but of the Anthropocene itself — a future already lived by those on the margins.

Celebrating its 20th anniversary, The Third Line presents The Only Way Out Is Through, curated by Shumon Basar. This ambitious project excavates two decades of the gallery’s history — intertwined with the cultural and urban evolution of Dubai itself — through archival works from every artist on its roster.

Organised into four historical epochs (2005–2009, 2010–2015, 2016–2020, 2021–2025), the exhibition becomes a walking timeline, punctuated by flash-sale revivals, oral histories, statistics, and rediscovered pieces long stored away. It is both celebration and critique: an archive activated, a memory reassembled, a portrait of art in a city that has rewritten the centre of the 21st century.

Ayyam Gallery presents The Fire’s Edge, the first solo exhibition by Ali Kaaf at the gallery, bringing together seminal bodies of work including the Rift, Ras Ras and Helmet series. Here, Kaaf explores the fragile threshold where ancestral practices meet modern erasure, using elemental materials — fire, ink, charcoal, glass — to meditate on disappearance, vulnerability, and persistence.

In Ras Ras, fire becomes both mark-maker and destructive force: faces dissolve into voids, referencing the absence of freedom of thought. In the Helmet series, blown-glass forms evoke ancient wartime headgear, fragile yet enduring mnemonic vessels. Across these works, Kaaf pushes material to the edge of collapse, revealing beauty through its potential undoing.

Marking Carbon 12’s 100th exhibition, Portuguese painter Gil Heitor Cortesão presents All That Is Solid, a suite of oil-on-plexiglass works that interrogate modernist interiors, transparency, and the slippages of perception.

Cortesão paints from reverse — beginning with small details, then constructing space outward — resulting in atmospheres where reflection disrupts legibility, plants seep into rooms, and architecture dissolves into memory. These works hover between coherence and dissolution, capturing the moment where an image begins to fade.

Green Art Gallery unveils Domestic Compositions, a new body of work by Kamrooz Aram centred on collage, the aesthetics of the arabesque, and postcolonial re-readings of image archives. The works feature collaged colour plates of Iranian artefacts sourced from pre-1978 Western art history books, embedded within painted grids and linen fields.

Through squares of colour echoing Josef Albers and through sculptural display elements that obscure as much as they reveal, Aram foregrounds the politics of representation and the material histories of cultural objects. His compositions activate entire systems of relations: between Eastern aesthetics and Western modernism, between desire and knowledge, between architecture and image.

Beautiful art pieces of still life, as if you can see a small piece of a art enthusiast’s home via the cupboards.

Curated by Hamzeh Alfarahneh, Lawrie Shabibi’s group exhibition By the Movement of All Things explores gesture, movement, and embodied memory as forms of knowledge. Featuring works by Igshaan Adams, Hamra Abbas, Diana Al-Hadid, James Webb, Bronwyn Katz, Timo Nasseri, and Moshekwa Langa, the exhibition considers abstraction not as negation, but as a repository of communal memory and ancestral wisdoms.

Through sculpture, textile, sound, and spatial installations, these artists treat motion as both subject and method — a way of transmitting knowledge that resists institutional narratives and privileges lineage, gesture, and presence.

Gallery Isabelle brings together Fereydoun Ave, Raana Farnoud, and Shaqayeq Arabi in Improvisations, an exhibition shaped by fragility, attentiveness, and intuitive play.

Farnoud’s paintings hover between presence and disappearance, Ave’s minimal forms settle into quiet poetry, and Arabi’s delicate sculptures embody resilience through fragile material gestures. The exhibition invites viewers to slow down — to stay with uncertainty, recognise the provisional, and find meaning in the unresolved.

Beyond the headline shows, Alserkal’s November rhythm unfolds across the Avenue in quieter, more unexpected pockets.

At 1x1 Gallery, the group exhibition A Cage Went in Search of a Bird uses architecture as metaphor, turning buildings into symbols of longing.

A few doors down, Aisha Alabbar Gallery presents Salma Dib’s Marks of Return — a subtle, luminous exploration of displacement through painting, sculpture, and neon.

At Efie Gallery, The Shape of Things to Come brings together influential artists such as El Anatsui and Carrie Mae Weems, imagining new futures through shifting material languages. Firetti Contemporary hosts Besher Koushaji, whose Moments of Hope extends his meditation on human fragility and endurance.

You will also find a tender second edition of Grey Noise’s ongoing conversation on abstraction, The Importance Of Staying Quiet, while Leila Heller Gallery transforms abandoned architecture into fantastical overgrown realms in The Wild Within.

Over at Taymour Grahne Projects, the mood softens through Matthew F. Fisher’s sunlit seascapes and Amy Lincoln’s delicate monochromes.

For those interested in visual activism, Zawyeh Gallery unveils Mohammed Joha’s Houselessness, where collage becomes a language of rupture and reassembly. And at Ishara Art Foundation, the global award Prix Pictet: Storm takes on climate, damage, and resilience through photography at its first international iteration after London.

Beyond the white cubes, Art Week moves through walkways, studios, and shared spaces, bringing together artists, researchers, and thinkers in encounters that span memory, speculation, and shifting geographies.

On November 22, at 12 pm, Authentic Narrative of The Curious Espionage of an Unnamed Moor unfolds in the Common Room, WH51. In this artist talk, Abdul Halik Azeez presents new research around the Institute of Consummate Memory — a speculative museum in a distant future — tracing resonances between early 19th-century maritime histories and the infrastructures of the contemporary Gulf and South Asia. Colonial routes blur with present-day logistics, and alternative South–South alliances emerge as possibilities within this collapsing temporal landscape.

Later in the day, at 4 pm, the same venue hosts the launch of Cold War Art Worlds: South Asian Art and Artists in Prague, 1947–1989. Author Simone Wille, joined in conversation by Dr. Diva Gujral, explores Prague as a pivotal hub for South Asian artists, revealing networks of mobility, solidarity, and exchange that complicate Cold War binaries and reshape narratives of global modernism.

Across these gatherings, Art Week becomes a site where histories are re-read, imagined futures take form, and the artistic field expands through dialogue, research, and collective presence.

Note: don't forget to register for the events, both of them are free to visit.