No Trespassing: Dubai exhibition challenges contradiction between gallery and street art

Ishara Art Foundation's new show brings together six artists

Rami Farook's intervention removes four square metres of the wall. Photo: Ishara Art Foundation

When curator Priyanka Mehra invited Fathima Mohiuddin to create works for a summer exhibition at the Ishara Art Foundation, she sensed a certain hesitation – a diffidence that suggested the street artist was out of her element.

Mohiuddin, who goes by the moniker Fatspatrol, is known for her sprawling bold murals. She has covered the facades of buildings in the UAE and Canada with her work. A famous local example is For the Love of Birds, where she decked seven buildings on Yas Island, Abu Dhabi with images of birds found in the UAE.

But the Mohiuddin in the gallery space was not the same artist that Mehra had become familiar with over the years. “She produced some designs on what she was planning to do in the space,” Mehra says. “But in my head I thought ‘this isn’t the Fatspatrol I know’. She’s a strong player with scale, but that wasn’t coming out.”

Mohiuddin’s timidity was understandable. After all, a street artist in a gallery setting is a bit of an oxymoron.

Fatspatrol (Fathima Mohiuddin) used brooms to paint The World Out There. Photo: Ishara Art Foundation

Street art, by definition, is inextricable from the urban environment. It responds to the architecture, the social fabric, the noise, grime and politics of public space. By contrast, galleries are curated and controlled. If anything, galleries can be antithetical to the core ethos that drives street artists. When street art enters a gallery setting, the immediacy that gives it its edge is blunted. It becomes sapped of its subversive spirit.

But the new exhibition at Ishara Art Foundation challenges (or even embraces) this inherent contradiction between the gallery and street art.

No Trespassing is the first summer exhibition to be held at the foundation. Running until August 30, it brings six artists into the gallery, presenting their works the same way they would in an open urban environment. “I told Fatspatrol to think of the space as a playground, not a white cube space,” Mehra says.

A week later, just before work on the exhibition was due to start, Mohiuddin returned from a trip to India with a “radical idea” of painting the space using a broom similar to those used by street sweepers. The result was a moving, even awe-inspiring gestural trail, with bold, fervent strokes from which emerge forms, like birds, faces and stop signs.

It is a thought-provoking work, particularly with the use of a broom to imprint marks in the gallery. It is an interesting use for a tool designed to sweep and clean. The work, dubbed The World Out There, also incorporated several scavenged objects, from discarded street signs and license plates to posters and scraps of wood.

“She could have gone very abstract with it, because it's easier to just make marks with the brooms. But then she has this beautiful, expressive quality,” Mehra says.

Mohiuddin’s work can be seen as the curatorial nucleus of No Trespassing. It is at the very centre of the exhibition, and is one of the few that is not in direct dialogue with adjacent works. But each work in the exhibition responds similarly to the gallery space. Some leave marks and even stage protests. Others speak out by removing elements.

A large-scale mixed-media work by H11235 (Kiran Maharjan). Photo: Ishara Art Foundation

Take the works in the opening space as examples. Kiran Maharjan, a street artist from Nepal who goes by H11235, presents two pieces that face one another. On the right is a collage that has many of the hallmarks of his oeuvre – blending photorealism with the digital while drawing parallels between architectural elements in the UAE and Nepal.

The work is the concept Maharjan had initially planned to paint in the space. However, as the artist wasn’t able to travel to the UAE due to visa issues, Maharjan as well as the Ishara team improvised, taking the initial design and abstracting it further. “We had to change the approach, because none of us can do this and paint like he does,” Mehra says.

Instead of rendering the hands and buildings with the photorealistic touch Maharjan is known for, the team on behalf of the artist replaced the design with materials, like corrugated steel and wood, blending them with acrylic panels. Thus, the project became at once a juxtaposition between what-is and what-could-have-been, while simultaneously testing the definition of authorship.

While Maharjan’s work is a vivid display of how an artist can leave a mark – even through their absence – Emirati artist Rami Farook underscores his presence by stripping one of the gallery's walls, baring its metal framing and insulating wool. The gypsum board that was removed leans against the perpendicular wall – the dust from the removal process still left on the floor.

“It is a very conceptual piece,” Mehra says. “It is talking about extraction, and this is the only work that is an extraction, as compared to putting something on the surface, which also brings us down to ownership.”

The rest of the works in No Trespassing spotlight other public and personal interactions with urban landscapes. In For a Better Modern Something, Emirati artist Sarah Alahbabi presents cement blocks printed with maps and superimposed by LED strips that run the surface of the wall and floor. The work draws from Abu Dhabi’s urban fabric and came as a result of Alahbabi’s experiences as a pedestrian in the city.

Salma Dib's work in No Trespassing. Photo: Ishara Art Foundation

The final space of the exhibition features two complimentary works. In Heritage Legacy Authentic, Palestinian-Filipino artist Khaled Esguerra reflects on the urban transformation of historic neighbourhoods. Sheets of ordinary copier paper are plastered on the floor, forming a surface that actively invites interaction.

Viewers are encouraged to stomp, tear, or even skid over the sheets. As the top layers strip away, words like Quality, Indulge and Fresh emerge, bringing to mind the sanitised rhetoric of billboards and commercial advertisements. These fragments of marketing-speak crowd the floor over the course of the exhibition, alluding to the takeover of gentrification.

The surrounding walls, meanwhile, are the work of Palestinian artist Salma Dib. Her layered, fragmented, and faded messages evoke the raw immediacy of graffiti – recalling how walls, in contested spaces, often become platforms of resistance. The work is inspired by the walls of Palestine, Jordan and Syria. The installation, Mehra says, is rooted in Dib’s own experiences while visiting refugee camps, “waking up to something and by the night it isn’t there any more”.

Mehra says Dib's piece took the longest time to produce in the exhibition. “Because she first spray paints the words, then sands it, layers it with joint compound and then she puts posters up and spray paints a bit more,” Mehra says. “It took three weeks to make.”

Collectively, the works in No Trespassing prompt a reconsideration of the everyday aesthetic of the streets. By bringing elements like copier paper, construction materials or faded wall markings into the gallery, the exhibition shows how torn flyers and weathered signs are not just coincidental noise in urban life, but a form of documentation.