Alserkal Avenue Brings You Déjà Vu: A Large-Scale Exhibition Like You've Never Seen Before

Déjà Vu is the new exhibition taking over Concrete at Alserkal you won't want to miss. On paper, it’s a large-scale show, 20 galleries, over 50 artists, the first time something like this has been done in the UAE.

It doesn’t feel like a group show

Usually, with exhibitions like this, you can feel the structure. Different galleries, different voices, everything slightly compartmentalised but here, it all kind of blends.

You move through works that don’t necessarily belong together but somehow sit in the same emotional space. There’s no clean narrative, no obvious entry point. It’s more fragmented, a bit disorienting at times, but in a way that feels intentional.

Things repeat, but not in the same way

The title makes sense once you spend some time with it.

The exhibition builds around this idea of repetition, not literal repetition, but the feeling of things happening again, slightly altered, slightly off. It pulls from Raed Yassin’s Déjà Vu and expands it into three loose directions: the uncanny, the absurdity of history, and the instability of language.

You see it in different ways.

Moments where something feels familiar but doesn’t quite land. Works that reference history but don’t feel anchored in the past. Text and symbols that look like they should make sense, but don’t fully resolve.

It’s not heavy-handed. It just sits there.

You don’t really “understand” it, you recognise it

There are names you know, Larissa Sansour, Nabil Anani, Samira Abbassy, Slavs and Tartars, and others you might not. But the experience isn’t about tracking who’s who.

It’s more about how the works speak to each other. Or sometimes don’t. There’s a tension between them, but also a kind of quiet alignment. Memory, identity, conflict, displacement, it’s all there, but nothing is explained too neatly.

And that’s probably why it works.

It feels very now, without trying too hard to be

There’s context behind the exhibition, the fact that it brings galleries together at a time when the art ecosystem needs it.

But it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to make a point about that.

Instead, it reflects something more subtle. The way things feel right now. Slightly repetitive, slightly unstable, hard to fully grasp but impossible to ignore.

You don’t rush this one

It’s the kind of show you move through slowly. Maybe circle back to a few works. Maybe not fully get everything.

And that’s fine. Because Déjà Vu isn’t really asking you to understand it but maybe just to notice the feeling.

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