No Trespassing

Ishara’s first summer exhibition, curated by Priyanka Mehra, features six UAE-based and South Asian artists exploring their relationship with the street – “a collection of individual experiences that alternate between chaotic and orderly, gritty and beautiful, uninhibited and curated … ‘No Trespassing’ looks at the streets as a site of deconstruction and reinvention, continually shaping and being shaped by those who pass through them”. So signposts, building materials, pavements, lights, street art, scrapheaps and human traces all become inscriptions of a city’s movement.

H11235 (Kiran Maharjan) was unable to be present on-site to create the piece, so his large-scale mixed-media work explores the possibilities of mark-making from a distance. An abstraction of a digital rendering presented opposite, the work” distils the intertwined bodily and architectural elements shown in the original” while incorporating locally sourced building materials” and “explores the impact of our material surroundings on the psyche”.

Rami Farook has carved out four square metres of the gallery’s back wall to reveal its hidden infrastructure and reflect on the ownership of space – and art.

In the second gallery, magpie favourite Fatspatrol (Fathima Mohiuddin) presents ‘The World Out There’, comprising “scavenged” objects – discarded street signs, scraps of wood and posters – marked with gestural drawings that extend beyond the mounted pieces and onto the surrounding wall. Adopting the persona of the flâneur – a solitary figure who wanders through a city, observing and contemplating the urban landscape – the artist collects such objects to rewrite their narratives using her own voice and language.

Sara Alahbabi’s ‘For a Better Modern Something’, an installation that explores Abu Dhabi’s evolving urban fabric, uses cement blocks printed with maps and joined together with LED tube lights to create a scaffolding-like structure

Khaled Esguerra’s installation in the third gallery, challenges ongoing efforts to conceal the disorderliness of urban centres. Titled ‘Heritage Legacy Authentic’, the work responds to the redevelopment of historic neighbourhoods, carried out with the promise of preserving heritage and authenticity. The work invites viewers to trash the sheets of copier paper laid on the floor and featuring words drawn from the promotional messaging of such projects.

To 30 August.

Above: Fatspatrol, The World Out There (2025: details). Below: H11235 (Kiran Maharjan), our anthropocene conundrum (2025)