Five exhibitions down, 11 still waiting. On Friday, we opened our Alserkal Avenue autumn guide with Part 1; today, we are going back in.

And Part 2 gets wonderfully strange: relationships become flowers, memories turn into butterflies, silence becomes art, and landscapes refuse to forget. Intrigued? You should be. Because today, my star students, we are diving into the next five exhibitions — preferably without attempting to conquer Alserkal in a single afternoon.

Exhibition: I Bloom Where You Hold Me
Dates: September 23 — November 4

I Bloom Where You Hold Me is an exhibition by Tirdad Hashemi and Soufia Erfanian, drawn from their ongoing Flower series, a body of work made by two pairs of hands.

So what is the exhibition about, and why flowers? For Hashemi and Erfanian, the flower is a metaphor for human relationships: it is fragile and bruises easily, yet given the right conditions it keeps growing, just as we do through the care and support of the people around us. These aren't only romantic partners but also friends, loved ones and the communities we build around ourselves.

You will notice another detail almost immediately: the collages are held together with needles. This is more than a practical choice, because a needle joins two pieces by piercing them, much as closeness can bring comfort and pain at the same time. Relationships here aren't presented as effortless or perfectly beautiful. They can make us vulnerable and they can hurt, and still we choose to hold on, to care for one another and to keep the connection alive.

What makes this idea even more compelling is that the works themselves are collaborative. Hashemi and Erfanian don't depict connection and mutual care from a distance; they make the work through them, with two artists contributing their individual hands to the same pieces. The relationship isn't only the subject of the exhibition but also part of the process that created it.

Exhibition: Private World
Date: September 23 — October 24

If the exhibitions in Part 1 were soloists, Private World is a quartet. Lulua Alyahya, Rami Farook, Sohrab Hura and Khaled Jarada each come at the same question from their own side: what happens when the outside world falls away and we are left alone with our inner one?

It is a question that echoes through the whole show. Solitude, seclusion, memory, relationships, fleeting moments, imagination: the same words keep drifting from wall to wall. But a shared question doesn't mean shared answers, and this is where the show gets interesting.

Lulua Alyahya, from Bahrain, builds spaces that hover somewhere between reality, memory and imagination. Dubai-based Rami Farook goes deeper, taking a more psychological route into intimacy. Sohrab Hura, who started out in documentary photography and now works in gouache among other media, turns scraps of ordinary life into images that feel more like remembering than recording. And Khaled Jarada, born in Gaza and now living in Paris, wanders into a more restless interior, where figures hang in uncertainty, caught mid-breath.

Same brief, four wildly different results. Each artist opens a different door into a private world, and the pleasure of the exhibition is in stepping through every one of them.

Exhibition: The Importance of Staying Quiet
Date: September 23 — December 30

When did you last look at something for more than three seconds? The Importance of Staying Quiet would like a word. And it comes with more than a decade of backstory.

The Importance of Staying Quiet began in Hong Kong in 2014, when curators Saira Ansari and Umer Butt brought together six decades of Pakistani art. Their argument was that minimalism and abstraction weren’t isolated experiments, but part of a much longer tradition.

Now, more than a decade later, they have picked up that conversation again, stretching it across a year of presentations and talks. Its sixth chapter is Open Forms, and this time the focus shifts to what happens when artists step away from storytelling. Instead of asking a work to explain itself, the show turns to form, material and the physical act of making — to work that grows out of what the curators call ‘self-imposed stillness’.

And that is where the title starts to make sense. The ‘quiet’ isn’t simply restraint or an absence of colour. It is a refusal to reveal everything at once. The works leave things unresolved, allowing meaning to emerge through looking rather than explanation. Which feels rather timely. We have become brilliant at judging an image in a split second: what it means, whether we like it, whether it deserves another glance. Open Forms asks you to do the opposite — to stay with a work a little longer before deciding what it is.

Exhibition: The sky held it, the earth remembered
Date: September 11 — December 15

Ishara Art Foundation got in early. The Sky Held It, the Earth Remembered opened before the season’s rush, so it had Alserkal Avenue almost to itself for a while — and we have already written about it before. But now that the crowds are back, leaving it out of this list would feel rather wrong. So, here we go.

The exhibition starts with an intriguing proposition: memory doesn’t belong to people alone. Land, water and even the sky can hold traces of what happened to them — sometimes long after those histories have disappeared from view. Bring together three artists from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, and that idea moves across three very different scales: a submerged village, a changing city and, eventually, the space.

Shahana Rajani looks to water. Her three-channel film follows communities in the Indus Delta whose ancestral villages now lie submerged following the construction of dams and barrages.

Rohini Devasher looks up — far beyond the Earth, into space. Latent Fields suspends three monumental silk panels, covered in imagery inspired by sunspots and other solar phenomena.

Sarker Protick, meanwhile, stays very close to home. His black-and-white photographs, taken between 2011 and 2026, return again and again to the small area of Dhaka where he was born and still lives.

And that is really what connects the three. A village can disappear beneath a river, greenery beneath concrete, cosmic information beyond the limits of our vision — but disappearance doesn’t necessarily mean that every trace is gone.

Exhibition: The Butterfly’s Burden
Dates: September 23 — November 7

The Butterfly’s Burden is a solo exhibition by Nada Elkalaawy, who approaches memory not as something that simply preserves what happened, but as something far stranger — something that keeps rewriting the past. And if that sounds a little strange, bear with me — it will make sense in a minute.

We tend to think of memory as a way of keeping things. Elkalaawy is interested in the fact that it also distorts them. Think of an old family photograph. You know who is in it and perhaps remember the day it was taken. Then the years pass. Certain details disappear; others become sharper. Some are filled in by your imagination until you are no longer entirely sure whether they actually happened at all.

It is this strange reshaping of memory that sits at the heart of Elkalaawy’s work. She doesn’t simply paint about memory; she makes the paintings themselves behave like memory.

And this is where an important term comes in: pentimento. It describes traces of an earlier image that remain visible after an artist has changed or painted over it. Perhaps a figure’s hand originally sat in one position before being moved somewhere else; over time, that first version begins to show through beneath the new layer.

Elkalaawy uses this process deliberately. Earlier images are concealed, altered and absorbed into new compositions, yet never quite disappear. And this is also where the butterfly in the title begins to make sense. Like memory, it is transformed into something almost unrecognisable from what it once was, while still carrying traces of its previous form.