The Third Line’s 20th anniversary exhibition celebrates tenacity in Dubai’s flux

“20 years in Dubai is like 80 elsewhere,” curator Shumon Basar quips. “And it usually takes 20 years for something to become history.”

Shumon is curating the 20th anniversary exhibition of The Third Line, a beloved Dubai contemporary art gallery platforming artists in the MENA region and its diaspora — co-founded by his longtime collaborator Sunny Rabhar. The Only Way Out Is Through: The Twentieth Line catalogues the evolution of the gallery’s two-decade artist roster, exhibitions, and community-based initiatives in conversation with the historical context of Dubai, the region, and contemporary world events.

Amidst the flurried surplus of contemporary art galleries today, there is a reminiscent sentimentality to celebrating The Third Line’s tenacity. Dubai is an elusively transient city; surviving in its hypercapitalist pace is a feat. It requires blind faith and dedication to endure and even thrive in it for decades.

“But to understand the world in 2025, we must go back 20 years,” Shumon says. 2025 also marks 20 years since he first came to Dubai and began writing, researching and curating in the region.

The gallery launched in a Dubai judged with utmost skepticism and sparse art spaces, amidst the post-9/11 residue of Arab-and-Islamophobia. Sunny and Shumon share that 9/11 triggered a generational sense of urgency to use stories of people and culture to counter the West’s ‘terrorist’ perception.

“Who’s gonna tell these stories?” Sunny asks me, “It really became a mission.” In late 2001, after studying in New York, Sunny returned to Dubai where she grew up. “We had work to do, and it had to happen fast.”  Together with her friend and writer Lisa Farjam, Bidoun launched in 2003: a culture magazine that humanized the MENA region and diaspora through platforming stories of its contemporary cultural producers. Bidoun magnetized regional writers and editors, including Shumon, to become its key contributors. “I mention Bidoun because it was the basis of what became The Third Line as a space… this exchange, learning, and inspiration.”

Sunny recalls glimpses of the DIY, start-up-esque energy of early 2000s Dubai. Her contemporaries, the so-called ‘Dubai Kids’, trickled back from abroad, generating a sub-culture of underground parties and grassroots art exhibitions amidst Dubai’s commercial boom. She reminisces curating exhibitions in Five Green, a then fashion boutique-cum-exhibition space in Oud Metha, which organically became a communal hang-out space for Dubai’s prodigal children.

Naturally, Sunny yearned for her own space. The Al Quoz industrial neighborhood offered high potential for its large, inexpensive warehouses amidst neighboring factories. With collaborators Claudia Cellini and Omar Ghobash, The Third Line opened in 2005 under a ‘novelties and framing’ trade license — the closest to an art gallery license at that time.

In the absence of ‘cultural institutions’, The Third Line was amongst Dubai’s key galleries that built the foundation of today’s arts and culture industry. Beyond a commercial gallery, they hosted talks, book clubs, Pecha Kuchas, film screenings, that congregated a discursive audience in early years. In 2008, entry into art fairs like Art Basel and Frieze validated their existence, even though conversations with Western collectors about Dubai were initially frustrating.

Dubai’s pace of change accelerated and the gallery grew alongside the UAE contemporary art scene. In the decade following were local art fairs launches, arrival of Western auction houses, more art galleries in Al Quoz, and establishment of museums and cultural districts. The government retroactively established policies and licenses for creative industries; the talent bred here now helping grow cultural scenes in neighboring Gulf countries. The gallery’s artists such as Farah Al Qassimi, Sophia Al-Maria, Hassan Hajjaj, Youssef Nabil, Slavs and Tatars, Sara Naim, are now resonant and recognizable names internationally.

The new ‘center’ of the global art world seems shifting here — with Riyadh, Jeddah, Alexandria, Beirut, Bukhara, Doha now lucrative hubs for contemporary art.

In the retrospective exhibition, Shumon charts these milestones from months of unearthing selected artworks from the gallery’s storage. They are curated chronologically in four historical chapters, with a timeline of key historical events guiding visitors and statistical data from researcher Tara Timberman transformed by UBIK’s graphic design to slick infographics. The exhibition builds on Shumon’s curatorial frameworks as the Commissioner of Art Dubai’s Global Art Forum over the past 16 years, where he converges conversations on trends and histories between past, present, and future.

Artworks in each chapter embody its zeitgeist, archiving history and punctuating temporal visual language and narratives. Amongst the close-to 70 pieces of work, Amir Fallah’s collage is reminiscent of inked-out, censored Vogue pages from the 2000s; Shirin Aliabadi’s Girls in Car depict Tehrani girls socializing in cars during lingering traffic; Bady Dalloul’s One Man Show capture the kitsch of Bur Dubai’s quotodian; and Jordan Nassar’s By The Flux alludes to speculative Palestinian landscapes through adapting the Palestinian tatreetz.

Shumon revives impromptu ‘flash sales’ from the gallery’s youth, selling long-unseen artworks at a 48-hour, one-time-only discount. Public programming will resurrect the gallery’s discursive energy, hosting talks with key protagonists in the gallery’s evolution.

“Reflection is a luxury most people don’t have,” says Shumon, hoping to gift this luxury to The Third Line. The show is a moment for rumination; how much has changed here? How much still needs to? The exhibition comes at a time of sociopolitical deja vu, where movements are mobilizing to again reiterate the humanity of the Global Majority’s identity. “We’re in another 9/11 type of moment, a horrendous one,” says Sunny.

The exhibition captures The Third Line’s enduring artist relationships, even through creative evolutions and seismic sociopolitical shifts. Perhaps it’s this steadfast commitment and patience that undercurrents The Third Line to endure Dubai’s quick satiation, temporality, and flux.

The Only Way Out Is Through: The Twentieth Line is on view at The Third Line, Dubai from 18 September – 7 November 2025.