Alserkal Art Week: Uprooted

Alserkal Art Week, “Uprooted”, takes place at Alserkal Avenue in Dubai from 16 to 23 November 2025 and explores the act of dislocation, inviting entry into its aftermath—an alchemical space of renewed connection shared by human and other-than-human presences. In the collective suspension shaped by ongoing uprootedness, the programme highlights resilience as attempts are made to re-route, re-grow, and form new, rhizomatic structures in unfamiliar environments.

The initiative evokes the disruptive act of removal and opens an alchemical space of renewed connection shared by human and other-than-human presences. In this condition of collective suspension shaped by ongoing dislocation, this art week highlights the resilience of diverse beings as they attempt to re-route, re-grow, and form new, rhizomatic structures in unfamiliar settings.

Within this framework, the main feature “Re-seeding Stories” offers a re-interpretation of the Majlis Talks by curators Uriel Orlow and Andrea Thal, blending dialogue and performance around water, myth, echoes, community, and rituals of grief to consider voice as a method of re-rooting dispersed narratives.

“Earth School”, the continuing platform by Kirstine Roepstorff, presents “Sowing Futures, Harvesting Value”, an assembly curated with Fatoş Üstek that re-frames ideas of value, regeneration, and reciprocity through conversations on art, ecology, archaeology, and emerging systems.

The Yard Screens installation “Scherben Mantra”, by Ali Kaaf with Ayyam Gallery, reflects the fragmented disorientation of uprooting, while a range of gallery exhibitions and guest projects explore its generative reverberations through architecture, AI, displacement, abstraction, charcoal, fire, glass, flora, fauna, and more.