Alserkal Lates, the annual event that inaugurates a new art season at Alserkal Avenue in Al Quoz, Dubai, is taking place on September 27.
The event will be held between 6pm and 10pm. More than a dozen new exhibitions will be unveiled at the district's galleries, with several of the artists present.
It will also feature immersive audiovisual installations and curator-led art walks, taking a slow and mindful approach to absorbing artworks across several galleries.
The event is free but registration is required through the Alserkal Avenue website.
An NFT exhibition by Morrow Collective will be showing at A4 Space. The artworks featured in Generative Human: the Exhibition were originally presented during the More than Human Summer by Alserkal Avenue. The works draw inspiration from nature and mythology, and explore themes related to fertility and growth.
Mud, Minarets and Meaningless Events at Jossa by Alserkal explores multidisciplinary research in the arts, highlighting why it is important to bolster experimental projects and how they might engage with the wider public.
The displayed projects were supported by Alserkal Arts Foundation’s Research Grants programme. They include Embodied Cartographies and Visual Entanglements in the Delta by artist duo Jeanne Penjan Lassus and Shahana Rajani. The project explores the changing, disappearing landscape of the Indus delta in Pakistan.
CINIMA3 Lodz-Casablanca by curator and independent researcher Lea Morin, meanwhile, also at Jossa, presents never-before-seen photographs and films by Moroccan filmmaker Abdelkrim Derkaoui during his time at the Lodz Film School in the 1960s.
The Loudspeaker and the Tower by multi-disciplinary artist Manar Moursi examines the structure of a mosque as a vertical symbol of power and as a horizontal multiplier of official and unsanctioned narratives in Cairo.
Mansi Choksi will also be launching her book The Newlyweds at A4 Space during Alserkal Lates. The work tells the story of three young couples in India who reject arranged marriages in favour of true love in the middle of social and political upheaval.
The Middle East Archive Profile meanwhile, which will be shown at The Yard, will display the first black and white educational documentary film to be shot by a Hollywood company about the Middle East and the Gulf. Filmed in 1955, archivist and collector Momin Swaitat came across it in an East London auction in 2018. The project marks the first time the work has been digitised and it forms part of the research platform Majazz Project, dedicated to digitising and preserving Arab audio-visual archives.
Several gallery spaces at Alserkal Avenue will also be presenting new exhibitions. These include Fables in the Unknown by Kais Salman at Ayyam Gallery. The Syrian painter takes cues from fables, incorporating animals and mythical creatures to depict the state of civilisation and the chaos of the human condition.
Stephanie Saade will hold her third solo exhibition at Grey Noise. Where Eyes Rest presents a new line of work that brings together personal objects, including worn curtains, toys, books and blankets, depicting their elasticity as they are altered to adapt to their new time spaces.
The Traps We Weave by Shivani Aggarwal at 1x1 Art Gallery unpacks the act of weaving as a meditative, contemplative practice. A centrepiece of the exhibition is the crocheted wire work Trap, an ongoing project woven stitch by stitch to allude to the elaborate traps we weave around ourselves.
Indian artist Navjot Altaf is also presenting her first solo exhibition in the region at Ishara Art Foundation. Titled Pattern, it features site-specific installations, sculptures, videos, drawings and photo prints, all of which reflect on climate change, ecology and feminism.
While Altaf has long been pondering about these issues across her five-decade career, the works in Pattern examine the challenges they face in the digital age.
The full list of exhibitions showing at Alserkal Avenue can be found at alserkal.online
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