Step into Dubai’s Al Quoz Industrial district and also you’ll see the telltale indicators of a spot mid-transformation: corrugated metal partitions, light industrial signage, the occasional half-finished mural. However flip onto Alserkal Avenue and the temper shifts—rapidly. Scooters whiz by, espresso machines hum, and somebody is inevitably hauling a sculpture by means of the courtyard. It appears like a cultural campus crossed with a start-up utopia, if both of these issues got here with a warmth index of 110.
Based in 2008 by Emirati patron Abdelmonem Bin Eisa Alserkal, the Avenue started with a single imaginative and prescient: to help and catalyze Dubai’s rising cultural infrastructure. The primary artwork gallery there, Ayyam, opened that 12 months with Carbon 12 following quickly after. The remainder of the district was full of warehouses, tire shops, autobody retailers, mechanics’ garages, and a uniform retailer.
By 2010, momentum had snowballed and Alserkal invested $13.6 million to double the district’s footprint by changing an adjoining marble manufacturing facility with purpose-built galleries and studios. There at the moment are round 90 inventive companies within the Avenue’s retrofitted warehouses, from structure corporations and design studios to performing arts areas and visible arts nonprofits spanning practically a million sq. toes. Situated within the district are 17 modern artwork galleries, together with a number of the area’s most revered, together with Carbon 12, The Third Line, and Inexperienced Artwork Gallery. The vibe is a miniature Chelsea, by means of Bushwick or Wynwood.
The expansion of Alserkal displays each the rising demand for a rooted cultural system in Dubai and Abdelmonem Bin Eisa Alserkal’s perception in long-term cultural funding. For Alserkal, the credit score to the Avenue’s success goes to the galleries and artists who took the preliminary danger: “I feel that is the pure progress of the artwork group that was born on this space,” Alserkal instructed The Nationwide in 2012. “It’s going to add an extension of the artwork group in Dubai the place artists, galleries and artwork lovers can get collectively and share their considerations. OK, we had the imaginative and prescient, however they’re those that put of their cash and believed on this space.”
Sunny Rahbar, a co-founder of The Third Line, echoed Alserkal’s sentiment over a decade later. “As soon as [the Alserkals] realized that lots of galleries needed to maneuver in right here, that this might be the artwork vacation spot, they mainly deliberate every thing round it,” Rahbar instructed ARTnews this week. “Sure, there are cafes and there are gyms however galleries get precedence and their focus is clearly on the humanities and ensuring that that is our house.”
The Avenue’s centerpiece is Concrete, an exhibition corridor designed by Rem Koolhaas’s Workplace for Metropolitan Structure that appears prefer it was carved out of an concept about how structure may dematerialize. Its huge, pivoting facade opens completely, blurring the boundary between in and out.
At present on view at Concrete is Vanishing Factors, a serious solo exhibition by Imran Qureshi, one of the influential figures in modern Indo-Persian miniature portray. Curated by Nada Raza, the present reframes South Asian city life by means of Qureshi’s layered, multisensory method—melding pictures, video, portray, and a large, 25-foot tall site-specific set up of woven patterns in pink, blue, and gold.
The Qureshi exhibition makes full use of the house’s scale and flexibility. Even in case you don’t know Concrete is the primary OMA undertaking within the UAE, you’ll acknowledge its DNA: rigorous, stripped-back, and quietly theatrical.
The programming throughout Alserkal displays related sensibilities. Over at Carbon 12, Michael Sailstorfer’s fourth solo outing is a charged affair—actually. His new collection, Air Electrical, turns electrical energy right into a portray software, utilizing copper mesh, silver ions, and managed present to create summary landscapes that shimmer between elemental and ethereal. The works are half alchemy, half engineering, and wholly rooted in Sailstorfer’s ongoing investigation of power—not simply as an idea, however as a visceral, materials power. Like a lot of his observe, the present reminds us that even industrial detritus can hum with poetic potential.
At The Third Line, a longtime anchor for regional artists, presently celebrating its twentieth 12 months in enterprise, Huda Lutfi’s Unraveling threads collectively three current our bodies of labor to disclose the more and more introspective arc of her observe. From collaged miniatures to sculptural abstractions, the present traces a path by means of private reminiscence, materiality, and ritual. The standout is The Seven-legged Demon of the Evening (2025), a brand new video work devoted to Lutfi’s mom, a seamstress whose legacy runs—fairly actually—by means of the artist’s use of thread and material.
To mark the beginning of a brand new multi-year partnership with Artwork Dubai, Mexican artist Héctor Zamora is placing on a sculptural efficiency during which a modern younger man makes an attempt—and fails—to enter a towering uncooked clay pot, finally smushing it into oblivion – a becoming theme for a district constructed on architectural palimpsest. Zamora has a knack for for large-scale interventions, together with a curving brick display put in on the Met’s rooftop in New York and a swarm of zeppelins over the Arsenale in Venice. This present was far more intimate with out shedding the wow issue one involves anticipate from the artist.
Driving the Avenue behind the scenes is the Alserkal Arts Basis, which was based in 2019. It hosts residencies, disburses analysis grants, and places on interdisciplinary programming with the purpose of fostering “different studying” and “experimental processes.” In observe, which means faciliating lots of very sensible folks doing very attention-grabbing issues with out worrying an excessive amount of about market viability. (Current initiatives embody a movie by Lawrence Abu Hamdan on the influence of wind for Syrian Jawlani group within the Golan Heights, and a efficiency by Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser exploring restorative contemplation.)
It’s not at all times simple to see the direct influence of that work, however you may really feel it—within the layered conversations, the looseness of the programming, the sense that somebody is at all times testing the boundaries of what an area like this may be.
In fact, a number of the Avenue’s branding—”the place the not possible occurs day-after-day“—skews a bit earnest. And sure, it’s simple to get swept up within the curated glow of all of it. However nonetheless Alserkal Avenue feels lived-in, risk-tolerant, and unusually dedicated to supporting work which may not at all times be Instagram-friendly.
It doesn’t really feel like a pre-fabricated venue, however a guess—an extended one—on what tradition can grow to be when it’s given time, house, and simply sufficient freedom to contradict itself.
