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15 Apr 2025
Alserkal Avenue, Installation View
This spring, Alserkal Art Week returns under the theme “A Wild Stitch” — a celebration of multiplicity, complexity, and creative unruliness. Across the cultural arteries of Alserkal Avenue, over 15 exhibitions, public installations, talks, and performances unravel the stitched seams of history, identity, and place, offering instead a fluid constellation of artistic responses to a world in flux.
Anchor exhibition: Imran Qureshi’s Vanishing Points at Concrete
At the center of the week, Imran Qureshi’s solo exhibition Vanishing Points, curated by Nada Raza at Concrete, reimagines the visual and conceptual frameworks that define our perception of space and history. A leading voice in the contemporary Indo-Persian miniature tradition, Qureshi layers painting, video, and photography to collapse distance and flatten perspective. The show invites viewers into richly textured urban landscapes where Mughal, Sikh, and post-industrial aesthetics converge, forming a poetic meditation on time and vision.
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Imran Qureshi. Still Moving.2019. Video.Courtesy of the artist
Public commissions: Between a Beach and a Slope, curated by Fatoş Üstek
Beyond gallery walls, the Avenue is activated by site-specific public artworks curated by Fatoş Üstek under the title Between a Beach and a Slope. Inspired by a poem by Emirati artist Nujoom Alghanem, the project reflects on the shifting topographies of belonging and memory. Highlights include Alghanem’s photographic façade work and Shilpa Gupta’s haunting light sculpture Still They Know Not What I Dream, installed in The Yard — both poetic reflections on presence, resistance, and spatial politics.
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Shilpa Gupta. We change each other, 2017. Light Installation. Courtesy of the artist
Gallery highlights: A stitchwork of global perspectives
Efie Gallery – María Magdalena Campos-Pons: I Am Soil. My Tears Are Water
To start with celebratory bubbles — make sure to stop by and enjoy Efie Gallery’s new space in Alserkal, right at the corner of Pekoe.
In a luminous solo exhibition, María Magdalena Campos-Pons invites viewers into a transcendent dialogue between nature and the human spirit. Through watercolors and sculpture, she explores the spiritual significance of plants like hibiscus, sugarcane, and heliconia — conduits of ancestral memory spanning Cuba, Nigeria, and the Middle East. Her layered, hyper-empathetic practice reflects a lifelong dedication to tracing the diasporic experience, colonial legacies, and ecological interdependence. The works merge painting and photography, using watercolor’s permeability as metaphor for hybridity and connection, rendering each piece an act of ritual, remembrance, and resistance.
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María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Untitled, 2021. Painting. Courtesy the Artist and Efie Gallery, Dubai.
Firetti Contemporary – Reynier Llanes: Reverie
The true tender experience.
Inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s philosophy of reverie, Cuban-American artist Reynier Llanes presents dreamlike portals into memory, myth, and human resilience. His latest series, The Poet, features ethereal figures adrift between past and present, celestial and terrestrial. Works like Solar and Stellar shimmer with gold and nostalgia, while Telephone and The Portal bridge the subconscious and the real. Llanes positions reverie not as escape, but as re-engagement — a quiet yet profound reshaping of time, grief, and beauty.
Read our interview with Reynier here.
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Lawrie Shabibi – Elias Sime: Through the Window - በመስኮቱ ውስጥ
This one fascinated this author the most. If the author was to describe this selection by Lawrie Shaibi, they would put — ‘unexpected’, ‘colourful’, and ‘sustainable’. The artworks are not what they seem at first.
In his first Middle East solo show, Ethiopian artist Elias Sime transforms e-waste—wires, circuit boards, and electronic fragments — into vast, tactile landscapes. Through the Window - በመስኮቱ ውስጥ — reflects on how technology mediates our perception of the world, suggesting apertures both architectural and digital. Sime’s intricate works resemble aerial maps or biological forms, confronting the viewer with questions of progress, extraction, and interconnection. His process is both meticulous and meditative, evoking a contemporary alchemy where human touch reclaims the machine.
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1x1 Art Gallery – Sohan Qadri
1x1 Gallery presents a powerful tribute to the late Indian artist Sohan Qadri (1932 – 2011) — a yogi, poet, and painter whose life journey spanned India, Tibet, East Africa, and Denmark. Known for his deeply spiritual approach, Qadri developed a technique involving carved incisions into thick handmade paper, dyed in vivid monochromes that pulse with rhythm and stillness. His meditative abstractions, steeped in tantric philosophy and breath work, dissolve boundaries between object and spirit, tradition and modernism. This exhibition offers a rare chance to enter Qadri’s timeless cosmology.
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Leila Heller Gallery – Reza Derakshani: I Paint Your Grace, I Paint Your Pain, I Paint Love
Persian-American artist Reza Derakshani returns with his first solo exhibition in five years — a rich, layered body of work exploring memory, displacement, and transformation. Drawing from Persian miniatures, poetry, and myth, Derakshani’s series The Hunt / Riders, Day and Night / Fig Leaf, and Migration / Grey Zone blend abstraction and figuration to chart human longing across political and spiritual terrains. Metallic paints shimmer with metaphor, while recurring motifs — horses, turtles, cartographic lines—trace histories of exile and endurance. It is a show of profound beauty and existential depth.
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Discourse and community: talk, think, make
Majlis Talks – CRIT CLUB by Cem A., curated by Stephanie Bailey
Art discourse takes on theatrical form in CRIT CLUB, a live, debate-style performance by Cem A. of a legendary @freeze_magazine, curated by Stephanie Bailey. Participants face absurdly “unrealistic questions” staged like a sporting match, satirising the performativity of critique in the global art world. Beneath its humor lies sharp analysis of cultural anxieties, institutional dynamics, and ideological contradictions that shape creative production today.
District-wide activations: Your leisure-time plans
Throughout the week, Alserkal Avenue hosts a full calendar of artist talks, workshops, screenings, open studios, and guided walkthroughs. These events draw audiences beyond the art object into dialogue with ideas, processes, and practices — turning the Avenue into a living, breathing studio of collective inquiry and shared imagination.
Come by to enjoy how art unravels in all its forms — from discussions to physical pieces and workshops.
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Alserkal Avenue
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