Maydan: A Living Agora

This clever collaboration fills one of Leila Heller’s gallery spaces with work by artists from Toronto’s Zaal Art Gallery for a short run that coincides with Art Dubai – thus providing curated exposure for rather more work than an Art Dubai booth would allow, and for a couple of days longer too.

The exhibition has a theme, too – Maydan, “a space of gathering, exchange, and dialogue, both as a physical site and as a symbolic structure embedded in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and global cultures … It embodies evolving notions of collectivism, identity, and shared presence”. So Maydan: A Living Agora brings together artists from diverse backgrounds who engage with the social, spatial, and conceptual dimensions of communal space with works that reflect the idea of Maydan as a platform for negotiation, memory, and storytelling within today’s shifting cultural landscapes …

It features works by Shirin Neshat, Marcos Grigorian, Katya Traboulsi, Zeinab Al Hashemi, Arash Nazari, Lorenzo Quinn, Aref Montazeri, Anton Bakker, Sofia Yeganeh, Katya Emelyanova, Azza Al Qubaisi, Jehangir Vazifdar, Marwan Sahmarani, Y.Z Kami, Wassef Boutros Ghali, Soraya Sharghi, Reza Aramesh, Parinaz Eleish Gharagozlou, Mehdi Farhadian, Farideh Lashai, and Behrang Samadzadegan.

To 20 April.

Above: Mehdi Farhadian, Allies (2023)