From 16 to 23 November 2025, Alserkal Art Week 2025, an exciting festival of contemporary art, will take over Alserkal Avenue in Al Quoz, Dubai. The festival will bring together galleries, public installations, workshops, film screenings, talks, and much more, all designed to foster curiosity, cross-disciplinary exchange, and big-picture thinking.
The upcoming edition of this event unfolds under the theme Uprooted, a reflection on displacement, transformation, and regeneration. The curatorial statement invites visitors to “picture roots wrenched from their homeground, suspended in the air.” This sense of disorientation and in-betweenness mirrors the current state of our world. Through performances, films, and public art commissions, the event reimagines what it means to re-seed and harvest value amid instability.
Across the Avenue’s 20+ galleries, over 15 new exhibitions will open during the week. Highlights include guest projects in collaboration with Prameya Art Foundation, Serendipity Arts Foundation, and Tabari Artspace, alongside Visualising Care, an exhibition curated by archaeologist Uzma Z. Rizvi and cartographer Sara Eichner. The exhibition is inspired by the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Mohenjo-Daro in Pakistan.
A key gathering this season is the Majlis Talks series, with the seminal session Stories Behind Stories curated by artist and writer Uriel Orlow and curator Andrea Thal. Conceived as a shared space for listening, remembering, mourning, and re-seeding, it will feature performance, text, and sound-based works from across the wider region.
Several exhibitions engage directly with the Uprooted theme. Efie Gallery is hosting The Shape of Things to Come, a group show where artists such as Carrie Mae Weems (USA) and Yinka Shonibare (UK) explore shifting realities of identity and belonging in an age of global flux. Shailesh B.R. (India) will present Departure, a solo show that reflects on forced departure through mixed-media collages and kinetic machines. English photographer Nick Brandt’s haunting photographs, which will be displayed at Waddington Custot, depict Syrian refugees in water-scarce Jordan: a stark meditation on how geopolitical conflict and climate change disrupt access to land and life.
To learn more about Alserkal Art Week 2025, please visit the official website of Alserkal Avenue.
Additionally, you might be interested in exploring Arranging Flowers by Gail Spaien and The Imaginary Museum.
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