Marking its first summer exhibition, Ishara Art Foundation presents No Trespassing, curated by Priyanka Mehra. Bringing the street into the white cube, the show assembles six artists from the UAE and South Asia whose practices reflect the complexity of urban life, not as backdrop, but as medium. Pavements, debris, signage, and scaffolding become visual scores of city movement, transformed into works that oscillate between control and chaos, memory and gesture.
Rather than defining the street, the exhibition engages it as a shifting, ungovernable surface; one that mirrors the improvisational nature of city life. H11235 explores absence and architectural memory with a large-scale mixed-media piece composed from afar, while Rami Farook makes a quiet incision into the gallery’s very structure, laying bare its hidden supports. In a nearby room, Fatspatrol assembles scavenged objects as urban relics, rewriting their meanings through intuitive mark-making.
Sara Alahbabi’s cement and light installation maps a pedestrian reading of Abu Dhabi’s car-centric sprawl, revealing overlooked flows of connection. Khaled Esguerra’s tiled floor piece critiques the sanitisation of heritage under redevelopment schemes, offering itself up to be walked on, torn, and altered by visitors. Alongside it, Salma Dib’s wall works layer text and trace into an ever-evolving visual palimpsest.
No Trespassing opens a conversation about space, visibility, and authorship, reimagining the gallery as a site of encounter. Through acts of erasure, inscription, and reinvention, the exhibition foregrounds the street as a generative space, where rules bend, meaning accumulates, and art takes root in fragments. Running throughout the summer, the exhibition is accompanied by guided tours, educational programmes, and conversations around the urban area as archive and action.
Location: Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai, UAE
Date: 4 July until 30 August 2025