Explosion of art as galleries launch autumn shows

Art Nights at Gate Village in DIFC kicks off an exciting season of exhibitions and events.

Asaad Arabi’s exhibition Nostalgia at the Ayyam Gallery in DIFC examines the legacy of the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, who died in 1975.

Several of these spaces launch brand-new shows tonight, while the rest stay open that bit later than usual, allowing viewers to get a decent, broad sweep of what this art enclave in the financial district has to offer. Art Nights is an open invitation, with plenty of art, a few musical interludes and one-off public art pieces dotted around the area.

The Empty Quarter, a photography-focused space, leads the new openings with Metropolis - City Life in the Urban Age.

"The show encompasses different aspects of urbanisation," says Elie Domit, the director of The Empty Quarter. "We have 34 photographers, from Manila to Caracas, and have divided the show into six chapters, almost like a book.

"Each chapter has either the city or human beings as protagonist. Over 71 per cent of world population exists in a city. We felt, living in a new city like Dubai, that it was important to highlight the problems that cities face today."

The show originally featured in Noorderlicht, an influential platform and museum for documentary photography based in the Netherlands, but Domit has augmented the original line-up to include a number of celebrated photographers he's had on his radar for some time.

Artspace is among the city's oldest art organisations, and gathers both modern and contemporary artists from across the Arab world. For the latest show, the team presents works by Monif Ajaj, paintings inspired by the stalemate of violence in Syria since the uprisings started. His figures are antagonistic in their appearance; they have a jarring, intimidating boldness behind their exaggerated eyes and strangled mouths. Born in 1968, Ajaj is able to bring a street-level abrasiveness to articulate painting.

Over at Ayyam Gallery, the solo show of Asaad Arabi, a slightly older Syrian painter, continues until October 27. Nostalgia examines the legacy of the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum. Each of Arabi's canvases depicts a room of oud players and cellists, while Kulthum's presence oscillates between abundance and absence.

Arabi uses this simple set-up of orchestra and singer as a space with which to interrogate different moods and styles of representation, such as figures wrought in anguish, rapture or exhilaration.

Artsawa has extended its operations from the industrial quarter to a "beautiful box" in DIFC, says Amel Makkawi, the gallery's director. Its second show in the space opens to coincide with Art Nights and is a group exhibition of 12 artists, including the Syrian Fadi Yazigi and the UAE artist Sumayyah Al Suwaidi. Dress Code Project examines how the socio-political conditions of time and place are manifested in the attire of a society. It continues until November 10.

Chants from Paradise, an exuberant selection of Safavid-period carpets, remains at The Farjam Collection until November. The show attempts to encapsulate the work of carpet weavers from the 16th and 17th centuries, one of the most refined eras in the craft.

It's the last few weeks to see Yeh Hai India Darling!, curated by Pia Copper, which is at XVA DIFC until October 30 before it moves to the XVA Bastakiya space. Copper has assembled a batch of artists who interpret the tensions between contemporary life in India and the enduring fabric of one of the world's oldest civilisations. Cheeky jibes mix with more disconcerting images of cultural implosion across this nine-artist show.

Cuadro's vast space is given over, until the end of the month, to a look at contemporary applications of collage - a technique popularised by Picasso and Braque but today used to create a tactile, often bristling visual language that hijacks the day-to-day material that surrounds us.

Highlights of this extensive show include works created by Alex De Fluvia during his 2010 residency at the space, hints of Cy Twombly in the obsessive layering of letters, along with a number of pieces by Khouloud Sharafi, who has been active in Dubai for some years and is etching out a recognisable, clean style in her collages.

Finally on the gallery front, Opera exhibits two prominent Korean painters, Kwon Ki-Soo and Kim Chang-Young. Ki-Soo creates complex, jovial scenes, painted on canvas and stainless steel, that incorporate digital blossoms, beaming cartoony characters and ponds unsettled by rain and perfect circular ripples. Chang-Young, on the other hand, uses real sand and oil to create illusory depths depicting dunes and anonymous footprints on the canvas.

In addition to the art, keep an ear out for a performance at 8pm by Hamdan Al Abri, the frontman of the Dubai band ABRI, who releases his eponymous solo EP later this month. And it's worth dropping by Christie's for a preview of highlights from the next Arab, Iranian and Turkish contemporary auction on October 26.

Art Nights runs tonight from 7pm-9pm at Gate Village, DIFC.