Alserkal Art Month Programme: 18-19 April 2026

18 April Programme and Gallery Openings

Alserkal has announced Alserkal Art Month, a collective expression of the resilience of the arts ecosystem in the UAE and the wider region that will run from 18 April to 18 May. Alserkal is joined by artists, cultural practitioners, and multidisciplinary collectives from across the region, as it expands its Art Week into a month-long initiative, Alserkal is joined by artists, cultural practitioners, and multidisciplinary collectives from across the region, as it expands its Art Week into a month-long initiative, providing a platform that will help sustain cultural engagement and create opportunities for dialogue, cultural enquiry and connection amongst the city’s creative community during this challenging time. The programme, which will span five weekends, will begin on 18 April as Alserkal Avenue’s contemporary art galleries preview their exhibitions as originally planned. The closing week, which will take place from 14-17 May, during Art Dubai 2026, will feature art commissions in partnership with the fair.

GREEN ART GALLERY | WH28

All the Lands from Sunrise to Sunset
Group show featuring: Alla Abdunabi, Fatma Al Ali, Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck and Michael Rakowitz
18 April – 1 June 2026

All the Lands from Sunrise to Sunset, a phrase attributed to the ancient Mesopotamian king Sargon of Akkad, invokes one of the earliest claims to total dominion. Taking this assertion as both a point of departure and a provocation, the exhibition brings together works by Alla Abdunabi, Fatma Al Ali, Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck, and Michael Rakowitz to examine the persistence of imperial logics over time through language, image, material, and myth.

If the rise of the nation-state shaped the 20th century, the present moment is increasingly defined by the return—or exposure—of imperial structures: extractive economies, contested geographies, and the symbolic afterlives of domination. Rather than presenting empire as a concluded historical form, the exhibition treats it as an ongoing condition—one that mutates, rebrands, and embeds itself in contemporary visual culture.

Across the exhibition, acts of naming, erasure, reconstruction, and repetition emerge as central gestures. A gulf is renamed; an artifact is rebuilt; a coin circulates; a lion persists only as a symbol. These works do not attempt to stabilize history, but dwell in its distortions, where fragility and power remain entangled.

CARBON12 | WH 37

Get Well Soon
Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola
14 April – 24 May 2026

Moving through a long history of botanical and floral painting, in this series of new paintings, Anthony Akinbola places himself in conversation with artists who have approached this genre across centuries. He enters this lineage through the arrangement of his long-explored material, the durag. Durags are stretchable fabrics worn over the head to shape and protect the hair, and, in Akinbola’s practice, they are both culturally loaded objects and a material he can reconfigure.

In Get Well Soon, Akinbola assembles durags into compositions that are drawn from the structure of classical floral still lifes. Translating this genre into fabric, seams and folds allows the image to form through construction rather than illusion, while the durag’s cultural charge continues to circulate within the work. Painting history, abstraction, and objecthood meet in the same space: petals emerge through stitching, density, and layering, and gravity becomes a quiet collaborator.

AISHA ALABBAR GALLERY | WH 19

In Circulation
Samar Hegazi, curated by Nadine Khoury
From 18 April

Samar Hejazi’s solo exhibition deliberately avoids a fixed framework or definitive conclusion. Instead, it positions a set of guiding questions: What prevails when support is destabilized? How is meaning reconfigured as foundational systems shift? In what ways do structures—material or internal—operate not through permanence, but through sustained resilience over time?

Rather than resolving these questions, the exhibition holds them in suspension, allowing meaning to emerge through material as a system of knowledge, not as medium.

AYYAM GALLERY | WH12

Creatures of Hope
Nihad Al-Turk
From 14 April

ISHARA ART FOUNDATION | WH 3

Urdu Worlds
Ali Kazim & Zarina
16 January – 13 June

Urdu Worlds is the UAE’s first contemporary art exhibition dedicated to the Urdu language. Curated by Hammad Nasar, the exhibition is a visual conversation around language between Ali Kazim and Zarina, and the debut institutional presentation of Kazim’s works in West Asia.

The show explores how language provides the tools with which we create and shape our internal ‘worlds’. Words, rather than simply describing our surroundings, give rise to our private lived experiences and shared cultural understandings. Urdu Worlds highlights the power of art as a bridge.

In different textures, colours and forms, it explores the potential to move from words to worlds. By creating a dialogue between the practices of Ali Kazim and Zarina—starkly distinct in visual presence yet closely connected in their restraint and simplicity—the exhibition opens a passage between two thoughtful and complex worlds.

THE THIRD LINE | WH 78

From the Perspective of Language
Sara Naim
4 March – Mid-May

Sara Naim’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery and her first public presentation of paintings. Produced intermittently between 2023 and 2026, the large-scale works move between figuration and abstraction to examine boundaries and the limits of representation through arrangements of symbolically charged imagery.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new video performance, Mother Practices Her Tongue (2026), which abstracts the Arabic language into gestures and sounds that no longer produce coherent meaning. Together, the paintings and video extend Naim’s ongoing investigation into how meaning is constructed through inherited systems such as language, symbols, and ideology.

LEILA HELLER GALLERY DUBAI | WH 87

The Great Wave — Douglas White
14 March – 8 May

Douglas White translates that charged image into monumental sculptural form. Constructed from fragments of blown-out tyres collected from roadsides around the world, the work captures the instant when immense energy gathers before release—an image that resonates uncannily with a historical moment marked by accelerating ecological, technological and geopolitical upheaval.

At the center of the exhibition stand two monumental sculptures: The Great Wave (after Hokusai) and a towering example from White’s celebrated Black Palm series.

Revealing the Unseen — Mehdi Mehdi Farhadian
14 March – 8 May

Revealing the Unseen presents a compelling body of work in which history, imagination, and memory converge. Farhadian’s paintings unfold like scenes from an imagined travelogue, inviting viewers into layered landscapes and interior settings that exist somewhere between reality and fiction.

All in the Family — Atieh Sohrabi, Farshid Shafiey, Baran Shafiey
14 March – 8 May

All in the Family brings together three artists whose practices are connected not only through shared cultural roots but also through familial ties. The exhibition explores the dialogue that emerges between generations of artists.