Twenty UAE galleries. Fifty artists. One selling exhibition at Concrete Alserkal Avenue that opens this Saturday and runs until May 8.
- Déjà Vu opens at Concrete Alserkal Avenue on April 25, running until May 8
- The UAE’s first collaborative gallery exhibition brings together 20 leading art spaces
- Over 50 regional artists explore memory, repetition and geopolitical absurdity
- The show is a selling exhibition designed to support galleries affected by current events
The Déjà Vu exhibition Dubai needed in 2026 is not one about nostalgia. It is about repetition as burden, memory as unreliable witness, and the particular exhaustion of watching history loop back on itself with different faces in the same old costumes. Opening at Concrete on Alserkal Avenue this Saturday April 25, it is the UAE’s first collaborative gallery exhibition of its kind, bringing together 20 of the country’s leading contemporary art spaces and more than 50 artists under a single roof, for a single shared purpose. It opens at 4pm and runs until May 8. Go this weekend while the opening energy is still in the room.
Over the past decade, Alserkal Avenue has grown from a handful of galleries into one of the central nodes of Dubai’s cultural infrastructure, now housing around 90 creative businesses across repurposed industrial spaces. Déjà Vu represents something different even within that context. It is not a standard group show. It is a collective response to a specific moment, conceived as a commercial initiative to support galleries that have been directly impacted by regional tensions and the disruption of the art season. The galleries participating include The Third Line, Green Art Gallery, Lawrie Shabibi, Carbon12, Grey Noise, Leila Heller Gallery Dubai, Tabari Artspace and sixteen others. The fact that twenty separate gallery businesses agreed to pool their artists into a single exhibition, curated by Alserkal’s own team, says something about both the difficulty of the moment and the solidarity it has produced.
The curatorial frame is built around three distinct streams and each one earns its place. The first explores the uncanny as it presents in historical mismatching and memory glitches, that disorienting sensation of recognition without clear origin. The second draws on Karl Marx’s observation that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, examining how people living in this region access and alter their memories of geopolitical tension in the face of new conflicts that feel simultaneously familiar and wrong. The third looks at linguistic slippage, the way language breaks down as a reliable tool for truth-telling when competing narratives flood every channel at once.
The artists exploring these ideas include Samira Abbassy, Sadik Alfraiji, Nabil Anani, Ammar Al Attar, Mirna Bamieh, Anahita Razmi, Larissa Sansour, Mithu Sen, Seher Shah, Slavs and Tartars and Raed Yassin, among many others. The show takes its cue from the absurdity of repetition, exploring the uncanny feeling of days revisited and the weight of perpetual recurrence. It is a theme that needs no explanation for anyone living in this region right now.
Alserkal Art Month’s programme also includes a Majlis Talks programme running alongside the exhibition, creative workshops led by Dirwaza Curatorial Lab, open studios and performances, making Déjà Vu one node in a broader month of programming rather than a standalone event. The timing, sitting between Art Dubai in April and the rescheduled Art Dubai special edition in May, means the cultural infrastructure around it is fully activated. This is the right exhibition at the right moment, in the right building.
Concrete at Alserkal Avenue, 4pm to 10pm on Saturday April 25. After that, the exhibition runs daily from 10am to 10pm until May 8. This one is worth the drive to Al Quoz!
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