No Trespassing opens at Ishara Art Foundation

Six contemporary artists explore their relationship with the street in Ishara Art Foundation’s first summer exhibition of 2025 in Dubai. No Trespassing curated by Priyanka Mehra looks at the streets as a site of deconstruction and re-invention continually shaping and being shaped by those who pass through them. Channelling the aesthetics of the street into the gallery in Alserkal Avenue, Dubai, the participating artists portray their individual experiences that alternate between chaotic and orderly, gritty and beautiful and uninhibited and curated. The exhibition features works by Fatspatrol (Fathima Mohiuddin), H11235 (Kiran Maharjan), Khaled Esguerra, Rami Farook, Salma Dib and Sara Alahbabi and is on view till August 30, 2025.

Scavenged items, discarded street signs, wood scraps and posters come together in Fatspatrol’s (Fathima Mohiuddin) artwork — The World Out There. The artist collects such objects to rewrite their narratives using her own voice and language as an act of reclaiming the street. It is a space, where we are instructed to follow the signs, she says, yet where new stories are continually being inscribed.

Inside the gallery, a large scale mixed media work, by H 11235 Kiran Maharjan explores the possibility of mark-making from a distance. Questioning the duality between humans and the built environment, he explores the impact of our materials surroundings on the psyche.

On one end of the gallery artist Rami Farooq carved out four square metres of the wall exposing the vulnerability of the white cube and prompting the reflection of the ownership of art and space. In Sara Alahbabi’s For a Better Modern Something, an installation that explores Abu Dhabi’s urban fabric, cement blocks are joined together with LED tube lights, creating a scaffolding-like structure. Her work reflects her experience as a pedestrian.

Khalid Esguerra’s installation ‘Heritage Legacy Authentic,’ responds to redevelopment of historic neighbourhoods and challenges ongoing efforts to conceal the disorderliness of urban centres. Viewers are invited to stomp, kick, thrash and tear sheets of copier paper, on the gallery floor, gradually revealing the printed words underneath.

Inspired by the historic walls of Palestine, Jordan and Syria, Salma Dib uses the walls of the gallery as a canvas with layers of traces, lettering, fragments and textured elements, transforming the gallery into a manuscript of thoughts and ideas of several authors.

Leaving their imprints on the walls and floors of the gallery, the artists have claimed the space as their own and challenged the perception that institutional forms of artistic expression hold greater cultural value.