All what you ever wanted to know about upcoming Alserkal Art Week
Guests at Alserkal Lates.
Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer
Alserkal Avenue, Dubai’s arts and culture district, is hosting the upcoming Alserkal Art Week (Feb. 25 – Mar. 3) and the week-long arts and culture programme opens with the immersive work Can You Hear Me? by leading artist and pioneering video art practitioner, Nalini Malani. Her work sets the tone and tempo of the arts extravaganza at Concrete, the multi-disciplinary cultural space at Alserkal Avenue. During the opening, there will also be an opportunity to hear curator Nada Raza in conversation with Malani (Feb. 25, 6 pm). Further, Alserkal Arts Foundation’s public art projects returns with a new commission by Dima Srouji, curated by Zoé Whitley, who is also the curator for this year’s edition of Majlis talks (Feb. 27). This will be followed by Alserkal Lates, which will see the Avenue activated from 10am – 10pm with exhibitions, slow art walks, and community workshops and pop-ups.
Textual and visual quotations, annotations and snippets of sound and music — artistic ‘thought bubbles’— come together, intersect, and are taken apart in Malani’s ‘animation chamber’ Can You Hear Me? An expression of outrage against social violence and global injustice, the exhibition projects a large-scale, nine-channel video installation of over 88 iPad-drawn animations made from 2018-2020.
Can You Hear Me? Will be accompanied by outdoor screenings of an adapted version of the artist’s seminal work, Ballad of a Woman, a 5-minute single channel stop motion animation hand-drawn on an iPad. It is a playful yet jarring animation inspired by Alfred Jarry’s theatre play Ubu Roi and Wislawa Szymborska’s ‘honest Ballad, penned neither to shock nor to offend’.
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Walk With Me is a site-specific public art commission curated by Whitley. The presentation is an invitation to forge new discoveries by walking the site. The project takes two points of departure, Rumi’s poem ‘Keep Walking’ and American poet Brenda Hillman’s opinion of form. What one uncovers on a walk can give new form and meaning to one’s experience of a place, rendering it memorable. The project launches with Dima Srouji This is Not Your Grave, who will lead a guided tour of the work.
Sessions at the Majlis include Dima Srouji, Whitley and Mandy El-Sayegh in conversation with Sara Raza; Abbas Akhavan in conversation with Whitley, Salima Hashmi, and Graciela Magnoni. The event concludes with a lecture performance by Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser. Muhannad Shono, a multi-disciplinary artist, will be speaking about his public art installation, A Forgotten Place, on March 2, with curator Tairone Bastien. The work is part of the Global Co-commission project A Feral Commons, helmed by Alserkal Advisory. It focuses on water condensate from air conditioning units inside warehouses on either side of the laneway in the Avenue, to irrigate a garden of plants. It is a look at the inadvertent and varied plant-life that grows largely unnoticed around Al Quoz, fed by unintended lifelines of condensate drip. A Forgotten Place draws attention to what the artist calls “AC ecologies”, representing nature’s resilience and adaptation to climate change.
Alserkal Lates invites visitors to explore the Avenue after dark. It will host 12 new exhibitions by the Avenue’s contemporary art galleries, a conversational Majlis Talks, a curator-led slow art walk at 8pm, and interactive public art commissions. Gallery shows: Carbon 12 brings an exhibition by one of Germany’s contemporary artists, André Butzer, who founded the Akademie Isotrop in Hamburg. The Third Line presents Farah Al Qasimi’s exhibition, offering a unique approach to visual storytelling.
Lawrie Shabibi introduces Mandy El-Sayegh in A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, curated by Sara Raza. It is an exhibition that collages fragments of information such as newspapers, aerial maps and her father’s calligraphy, alongside hand-painted elements and non-traditional materials such as latex, and investigating the relationship between them. The show also includes a performance by the artist.
Green Art Gallery presents the work of Ana Mazzei, How to disappear, inviting guests to explore the complex nature of identity. Leila Heller Gallery promises a solo exhibition by renowned glass sculptor Dale Chihuly. The gallery will also present Carpets of Eden, Gardens of Fantasy, a curated exploration of the mystical qualities of carpets in the realm of fantasy, and Immortal Mirror by Aref Montazeri, featuring handmade mirrors that invite audiences to discover themselves in new situations.
Ayyam Gallery’s Immortal Moment, Coping with the Shock by Faisal Samra, delves into the concept of an immortal moment and the coping mechanisms associated with it. 1x1 Art Gallery presents two exhibitions: Owais Husai’s solo exhibition featuring his latest artistic endeavours, and Graciela Magnoni’s Watan, curated by Salima Hashmi, exploring themes of identity and belonging. Firetti Contemporary will host two exhibitions: The Fifth Wife, a group exhibition curated by Mara Firetti, Celine Azem and Ali Cha’aban, and Metamorphosis, curated by Mara Firetti and Celine Azem, which showcases Laura Lappi’s sculptures inspired by ancient basilicas, cathedrals, and mediaeval Scandinavian wooden structures.
Gallery Isabelle introduces the upcoming duo exhibition, Rest, featuring the works of Dubai-based artists Mohammed Kazem and Vikram Divecha. It runs Feb. 27 – Apr. 15. Ishara Art Foundation is currently displaying Sheher, Prakriti, Devi, an exhibition that marks artist and photographer Gauri Gill’s first extensive curation. It ruminates on the interlinked elationship between cities, the natural environment and the sacred. Volte Art Projects presents a solo exhibition of modernist master of the figurative genre, Manjit Bawa — one of those who took up figuration from the word go.
