Alserkal Art Week 2025: Welcome dissent with A Wild Stitch
No neat stitches at Alserkal Art Week…
Alserkal Art Week is back in the new year – in great news for all the art enthusiasts, culture crawlers and fine philosophy fiends – and this year, the week-long programme invites you to lose yourself and discover a new meaning of rebellion with A Wild Stitch , the theme of this stint.
Running from April 13 to 20, this edition comes as a challenger to singular perspectives, as always responding to the need of the hour and the region, and reaffirming it's role in sparking a flame of unabashed, bold conversation around the present. Singularity is a fallacy, but why? Why do we need perspectives of variety, of multiplicity, hybridity? Through this curation, take an alternate look at narratives that refuse to be neatly stitched into submission.
The flagship exhibition
The highlight of the week, the flagship exhibition of this edition is Vanishing Points debuting new works by Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi, presented for the first time at Concrete. Curated by Nada Raza, the exhibition is all about miniature art and showcases photography, video, painting, and site-specific installations by Qureshi.
Qureshi is a leading figure from the acclaimed Lahore school of contemporary Indo-Persian miniature painting, renowned for his innovative reimagining of this classical form. He captures the layered cityscapes of South Asia, where Mughal and Sikh architecture merge with the post-industrial present, rejecting the singular, narrow gaze of European perspective, by collaborating with skilled practitioners. Public Art Commissions
Curated by independent writer and curator Fatoş Üstek, this year's public art commissions across the Avenue include Between a Beach and Slope , inspired by Emirati artist Nujoom Alghanem's poem of the same name and Indian artist Shilpa Gupta's light-text sculpture in The Yard, Still They Know Not What I Dream , gives form to silence and resistance. The commissions will be accompanied by talks by the artists and curator, live block-printing workshops,and a film screening. Majlis Talks
Curated by Stephanie Bailey, the Majlis Talks hosts a special edition of Crit Club, a performance project. Framed as a sports tournament, the talks invite participants into a site-specific arena to dialogue and debate on unrealistic questions and impossible positions—drawn from conversations within the UAE art scene. Gallery Exhibitions
Alserkal Art Week brings together artists from the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, with 16 galleries presenting exhibitions that confront histories of displacement, resilience, and identity. Some of these include Cuban artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons' I Am Soil. My Tears Are Water, Zawyeh Gallery's British-Palestinian artist Bashir Makhoul's The Promise, and Ayyam Gallery showcasing Iraqi-Palestinian Sama Alshaibi's photographs, reconstructing Baghdad's shifting landscapes through LiDAR technology and archives, bodies and identity.
Discover the rest of the programme here…
Alserkal Art Week, Alserkal Avenue, Apr 13 to 20, @alserkalavenue
Images: Supplied
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