Dubai gains another gallery

Dubai has acquired another non-commercial gallery space with the opening last month of La Galerie, a space in the spiffily renovated Alliance Française premises in Oud Metha.

The gallery will be dedicated to artists from “the Francophone and Francophile communities”, which casts a suitably broad net. Interestingly, each show will have a guest curator – the first exhibition, for multimedia artist Sheikha Wafa Bint Hasher Al Maktoum, has been curated by Meem’s Meagan Kelly Horsman (the artist is a regular at Meem). Under the title Seamless Loop, this show runs until 21 Jan.

The next exhibition (25 Jan to 18 Feb) is Antidote’s Ink Project, a group show around contemporary works on paper which indicates the breadth of the Francophone/Francophile definition – Antidote itself has Fench leanings and one of the three artists is Joelle Verstraeten from Belgium (that’s her work Papier a Musique above), but the other two are the UAE’s Nasir Nasrallah and Sarah Mumtaz from Pakistan.

That will be followed by another Antidote collaboration, the International Women Photographers Award – work from the 10 finalists will be shown at La Galerie from 8 March to 8 April.

La Galerie is here. It’s normally open Sunday to Thursday, 9am to 8pm. Entry is free, there’s a very nice café next door, and you don’t even have to speak French …

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