Step into Dubai’s Al Quoz Industrial district and you’ll see the telltale signs of a place mid-transformation: corrugated steel walls, faded industrial signage, the occasional half-finished mural. But turn onto Alserkal Avenue and the mood shifts—quickly. Scooters whiz by, espresso machines hum, and someone is inevitably hauling a sculpture through the courtyard. It feels like a cultural campus crossed with a start-up utopia, if either of those things came with a heat index of 110.
Founded in 2008 by Emirati patron Abdelmonem Bin Eisa Alserkal, the Avenue began with a single vision: to support and catalyze Dubai’s growing cultural infrastructure. The first art gallery there, Ayyam, opened that year with Carbon 12 following soon after. The rest of the district was filled with warehouses, tire stores, autobody shops, mechanics’ garages, and a uniform store.
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By 2010, momentum had snowballed and Alserkal invested $13.6 million to double the district’s footprint by replacing an adjacent marble factory with purpose-built galleries and studios. There are now around 90 creative businesses in the Avenue’s retrofitted warehouses, from architecture firms and design studios to performing arts spaces and visual arts nonprofits spanning nearly one million square feet. Located in the district are 17 contemporary art galleries, including some of the region’s most respected, including Carbon 12, The Third Line, and Green Art Gallery. The vibe is a miniature Chelsea, by way of Bushwick or Wynwood.
The growth of Alserkal reflects both the rising demand for a rooted cultural system in Dubai and Abdelmonem Bin Eisa Alserkal’s belief in long-term cultural investment. For Alserkal, the credit to the Avenue’s success goes to the galleries and artists who took the initial risk: “I think this is the natural growth of the art community that was born in this area,” Alserkal told The National in 2012. “It will add an extension of the art community in Dubai where artists, galleries and art lovers can get together and share their concerns. OK, we had the vision, but they are the ones that put in their money and believed in this area.”
Sunny Rahbar, a co-founder of The Third Line, echoed Alserkal’s sentiment over a decade later. “Once [the Alserkals] realized that a lot of galleries wanted to move in here, that this could be the art destination, they basically planned everything around it,” Rahbar told ARTnews this week. “Yes, there are cafes and there are gyms but galleries get priority and their focus is clearly on the arts and making sure that this is our home.”
The Avenue’s centerpiece is Concrete, an exhibition hall designed by Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture that looks like it was carved out of an idea about how architecture might dematerialize. Its massive, pivoting facade opens entirely, blurring the boundary between inside and out.
Currently on view at Concrete is Vanishing Points, a major solo exhibition by Imran Qureshi, one of the most influential figures in contemporary Indo-Persian miniature painting. Curated by Nada Raza, the show reframes South Asian urban life through Qureshi’s layered, multisensory approach—melding photography, video, painting, and a massive, 25-foot tall site-specific installation of woven patterns in red, blue, and gold.
The Qureshi exhibition makes full use of the space’s scale and versatility. Even if you don’t know Concrete is the first OMA project in the UAE, you’ll recognize its DNA: rigorous, stripped-back, and quietly theatrical.
The programming across Alserkal reflects similar sensibilities. Over at Carbon 12, Michael Sailstorfer’s fourth solo outing is a charged affair—literally. His new series, Air Electric, turns electricity into a painting tool, using copper mesh, silver ions, and controlled current to create abstract landscapes that shimmer between elemental and ethereal. The works are part alchemy, part engineering, and wholly rooted in Sailstorfer’s ongoing investigation of energy—not just as a concept, but as a visceral, material force. Like much of his practice, the show reminds us that even industrial detritus can hum with poetic potential.
At The Third Line, a longtime anchor for regional artists, currently celebrating its 20th year in business, Huda Lutfi’s Unraveling threads together three recent bodies of work to reveal the increasingly introspective arc of her practice. From collaged miniatures to sculptural abstractions, the show traces a path through personal memory, materiality, and ritual. The standout is The Seven-legged Demon of the Night (2025), a new video work dedicated to Lutfi’s mother, a seamstress whose legacy runs—quite literally—through the artist’s use of thread and fabric.
To mark the start of a new multi-year partnership with Art Dubai, Mexican artist Héctor Zamora is putting on a sculptural performance in which a sleek young man attempts—and fails—to enter a towering raw clay pot, ultimately smushing it into oblivion – a fitting theme for a district built on architectural palimpsest. Zamora has a knack for for large-scale interventions, including a curving brick screen installed on the Met’s rooftop in New York and a swarm of zeppelins over the Arsenale in Venice. This show was much more intimate without losing the wow factor one comes to expect from the artist.
Driving the Avenue behind the scenes is the Alserkal Arts Foundation, which was founded in 2019. It hosts residencies, disburses research grants, and puts on interdisciplinary programming with the aim of fostering “alternative learning” and “experimental processes.” In practice, that means faciliating a lot of very smart people doing very interesting things without worrying too much about market viability. (Recent projects include a film by Lawrence Abu Hamdan on the impact of wind for Syrian Jawlani community in the Golan Heights, and a performance by Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser exploring restorative contemplation.)
It’s not always easy to see the direct impact of that work, but you can feel it—in the layered conversations, the looseness of the programming, the sense that someone is always testing the limits of what a space like this can be.
Of course, some of the Avenue’s branding—”where the impossible happens every day“—skews a bit earnest. And yes, it’s easy to get swept up in the curated glow of it all. But still Alserkal Avenue feels lived-in, risk-tolerant, and unusually committed to supporting work that might not always be Instagram-friendly.
It doesn’t feel like a pre-fabricated venue, but a bet—a long one—on what culture can become when it’s given time, space, and just enough freedom to contradict itself.
