No Trespassing, No Apologies: Ishara Art Foundation’s Streetwise Summer Show

Dubai’s summer art scene takes an unexpected turn with No Trespassing, the Ishara Art Foundation’s first warm-season exhibition. Instead of neat walls and polite silence, this show leans into the noise, texture, and unpredictability of the street.

Curated by Priyanka Mehra, it brings together six artists from the UAE and South Asia who each use the street not just as inspiration, but as a working surface; a space of memory, friction, and everyday resistance.

The works aren’t trying to define what the street is. They’re responding to its shifting character — the signs, the scraps, the tension between public and personal. In The World Out There, Fatspatrol (Fathima Mohiuddin) reimagines the flâneur figure by collecting fragments of urban life — street signs, wood, posters — and turning them into something almost intimate. Her marks extend beyond the pieces and onto the wall itself, like she’s trying to make the city speak in her own language.

In the main gallery, Khaled Esguerra and Salma Dib pull you into the contradictions of urban redevelopment with Heritage Legacy Authentic — a floor installation of walk-over paper and blacked-out slogans. Visitors are encouraged to kick, tear, and scrape, slowly revealing what lies beneath. It's part commentary, part performance, part therapy.

Rami Farook does something quiet but bold: he removes a section of the gallery wall and gives it to the foundation’s team — a literal opening-up of space that feels more like a gesture of trust than an artwork. Meanwhile, Sara Alahbabi draws on her experience walking through Abu Dhabi — a city not exactly made for pedestrians — to map the city’s under-noticed rhythms and spaces.

What ties it all together is an openness to contradiction. No Trespassing doesn’t try to polish or simplify the messiness of urban life. It leans into it. These works sit somewhere between the found and the made, between resistance and reflection. The show runs until 30 August, and it’s worth spending time with. Just don’t expect to stay on the surface.

Until August 30th at Ishara Art Foundation. See more about it here