Alserkal Art Week 2025 is an invitation to weave new narratives across the region’s cultural fabric

Dubai’s renowned Alserkal Avenue unveils its much-anticipated annual Alserkal Art Week, set against the theme “A Wild Stitch.” Running from April 13 to 20, this celebrated cultural gathering, highlighting talents from the Global South, seeks to unravel and reweave the familiar, offering a multi-dimensional platform for art, conversation, and reflection. The week’s programme champions themes of hybridity, multiplicity, and the discomfort of neatly fitting into predefined narratives.

The heart of this year’s showcase is Vanishing Points, a significant new exhibition by the renowned Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi. Curated by Nada Raza, the show is a compelling exploration of the cityscape through Qureshi’s eyes, where Indo-Persian miniature painting converges with video, photography, and installation. His intimate portrayal of South Asia’s layered cityscapes prompts viewers to reconsider how the world can be seen through a miniature lens—both expansive and contained at once.

Elsewhere on the Avenue, the public art commissions curated by Fatoş Üstek present works that interrogate belonging, landscape, and resistance. Inspired by Emirati poet Nujoom Alghanem’s Between a Beach and Slope, these new commissions feature a striking photographic intervention by Alghanem herself, and an evocative light sculpture by Indian artist Shilpa Gupta. Each piece serves as a conversation starter, inviting viewers to ponder the relationship between self and the shifting urban environment.

In the Majlis Talks, Crit Club by Cem A brings an unconventional approach to discourse, framing debates as performance art. Featuring artists like Adelita Husni-Bey, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, and Urok Shirhan, these lively dialogues challenge conventional positions and dissect the art world’s complexities through playful yet insightful “impossible questions.” This performance project adds a dynamic layer to the week, furthering Alserkal’s reputation as a platform for cutting-edge artistic and intellectual exchange.

The galleries within the Avenue will also present new exhibitions that capture global concerns through regional lenses. Efie Gallery introduces María Magdalena Campos-Pons’ I Am Soil. My Tears Are Water, a meditative exploration of migration, memory, and the colonial legacies that continue to shape the diaspora. Other galleries, like Zawyeh Gallery, present poignant works that focus on displacement, with Sama Alshaibi’s photographic work interrogating shifting landscapes in her native Baghdad. From the visceral to the cerebral, these exhibitions underscore the region’s enduring themes of identity, memory, and the human condition.

Among the guest projects, Maydan: A Living Agora, curated by Behrang Samadzadegan, reimagines the “Maydan”—a gathering space—through the lens of contemporary artists who seek to bridge cultures through their work. Meanwhile, Hadieh Shafie’s Resonant Turns at The Mine presents a stunning display of sculptural scrolls and cascading forms, transforming language and repetition into cyclical storytelling.

A highlight of this year’s festivities is the site-specific installation Existence-Emitting Movements by Mexican artist Héctor Zamora. This performance-installation, marking the beginning of a new collaboration between Art Dubai and Alserkal Avenue, combines the tactile engagement of terracotta objects with symbolic actions, inviting introspective reflections on human culture and ritual.

As ever, this year’s Art Week offers both local and international artists a space to challenge the conventional, creating works that ask us to rethink the fabric of our ever-evolving cultural landscape.