Ishara Art Foundation presents No Trespassing, a bold exhibition featuring six UAE-based and South Asian artists: Fatspatrol (Fathima Mohiuddin), H11235 (Kiran Maharjan), Khaled Esguerra, Rami Farook, Salma Dib, and Sara Alahbabi. Curated by Priyanka Mehra, the show activates the pristine gallery space with the textures, marks, and energy of the street. On view until 30 August 2025, the exhibition invites viewers to reconsider the boundaries between public and institutional space, art and infrastructure, presence, and erasure.
Rather than treating the street as a mere backdrop, the participating creatives bring its materiality into direct conversation with the white cube. Through on-site interventions, “tagging” the gallery’s walls and floors, and even carving into its structure, the artworks on display challenge the authority of institutional space and affirm the street as a contested and ever-shifting site of authorship.
H11235 (Kiran Maharjan) is a street artist whose practice spans photorealism and digital abstraction. The exhibition showcases his large-scale, remotely produced mixed-media art piece that combines digitally abstracted elements with raw building materials like corrugated metal and engineered wood. The work explores the blurred boundary between human experience and the built environment. It reflects on how our physical surroundings shape internal states and social order.
Rami Farook, an Emirati interdisciplinary artist, approaches his practice as a form of “self and social portraiture”: emotionally driven yet anchored in journaling and reflexivity. For No Trespassing, he incises four square metres of the gallery wall to expose its hidden infrastructure. This physical intervention renders the white cube vulnerable and prompts reflection on the ownership of art and space. The removed material becomes a gift back to the institution, symbolising trust and shared custodianship.
Fatspatrol (Fathima Mohiuddin), a multidisciplinary artist of Indian descent, examines creativity as a vital social force. The exhibition features her installation Offers The World Out There that comprises “scavenged” objects, such as street signs, scraps, and posters. These are embedded with gestural drawings that extend onto the gallery walls. Through this assemblage, Mohiuddin reclaims the discarded and overlooked, transforming urban detritus into layered visual narratives.
Emirati conceptual artist and educator Sara Alahbabi interrogates visibility, movement, and belonging within the urban landscape. She contributes For a Better Modern Something, an installation that comprises cement blocks printed with maps, connected by LED tube lights in a grid formation. Inspired by walking-through-Abu Dhabi as a pedestrian, this piece draws focus to non-car-centric patterns of urban flow.
Palestinian-Filipino artist Khaled Esguerra, whose work delves into themes of culture, identity, and modernity, presents Heritage Legacy Authentic, an artwork that critiques the sanitisation of historic neighbourhoods under the guise of redevelopment. The work covers the floor with sheets printed with promotional redevelopment messaging masked with carbon paper, which visitors can walk on, tear, and reveal over time. The surrounding walls feature remnants and markings that evoke the layered surfaces of Middle Eastern cityscapes.
Meanwhile, Palestinian interdisciplinary artist Salma Dib, whose work explores diasporic memory and the experience of distance, collaborates with the space’s surfaces around Esguerra’s installation. Dib contributes wall-based pieces composed of lettering, fragments, and tactile layers. Her work captures the residue of time, place, and authorship, evoking the traces left by bodies and histories in motion.
To get more information about No Trespassing, please go to the official web page of the exhibition.
In addition, you might be interested in attending I PUT MY BRAIN ON PAUSE! by Ihab Ahmad.
