Art & Culture

This Week in Culture: Architecture, Myth, and the Ground Beneath Our Feet all at Alserkal Avenue

BYLeila Khatib

January 16, 2026

Dubai’s January cultural calendar is packed with a series of openings that explore space, symbols, and terrain. Across galleries and public platforms, this month’s program so far reflects the region’s focus on deep new and delightful culture.

Read on to discover the coolest cultural happenings in Dubai this week. Consider your weekend plans sorted.

Flowers as Architecture at UrArtU Gallery

UrArtU Gallery opens its new permanent home in Alserkal Avenue brought to life by Crosby Studios, transforming floristry into an architectural and emotional language. Conceived as a 220-square-meter multi-purpose gallery, the space positions floral art beyond decoration and more as structural and narrative elements.

At its center stands a six-meter-high aluminum orchid, part sculpture, part architecture- anchoring an interior defined by contrast: softness and strength, fragility and weight. Materiality plays a defining role throughout. Microcement flooring grounds the space, while Italian marble tiles by Stonetta introduce tactility and permanence. Aluminum composite wall panels and a grey-painted finish developed in collaboration with Jotun complete an industrial-luxury palette designed to emphasize reflection, texture, and light.

A red-lit walk-in fridge doubles as both technical infrastructure and visual centerpiece, radiating colour into the surrounding space. Rooted in Crosby Studios’ philosophy of Transformism, the project reframes floristry as an experiential discipline: architectural, immersive, and emotionally charged, marking UrArtU’s evolution into a cultural platform rather than a traditional gallery.

Deconstructing Symbols at Carbon 12

Opening this week at Carbon 12, The Task of the Mythologist marks Anahita Razmi’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, Razmi examines how symbols- from emojis and pop references to talismanic garments, accumulate and fracture meaning depending on context, circulation, and framing.

Works from her ongoing Talismanic Polarities series pair historic Islamic shirts with words like “YES,” “BUT,” “NO,” and “AND,” foregrounding the narrative devices we instinctively use to interpret objects. Elsewhere, Oasis band T-shirts densely covered with evil-eye motifs destabilize binaries of East and West, masculinity and femininity, belief and kitsch.

Rather than offering fixed readings, the exhibition invites viewers to sit with ambiguity, positioning interpretation itself as a constructed act, and the gallery as an active participant in shaping meaning.

Landscapes Under Pressure at Concrete

Also opening in Alserkal Avenue, CRACK marks the global premiere of Werner Bronkhorst’s most ambitious body of work to date. Presented across four immersive rooms at Concrete, the exhibition unfolds through clay courts, deserts, salt flats, and imagined terrains- surfaces shaped by heat, force, sport, and memory.

Bronkhorst’s signature miniature figures populate vast, textured colour fields that balance humour with introspection. Referencing childhood games, travel rituals, and personal history, CRACK explores how landscapes and people absorb pressure and retain trace. Works like Let’s Clay, Caravan Life, and The Pilgrimage transform single colour palettes into expansive emotional worlds, where movement and stillness coexist.

Quoz Arts Fest 2026

Culminating the month, Quoz Arts Fest returns for its 14th edition on 24 and 25 January, expanding the conversation beyond gallery walls and into the wider Al Quoz Creative Zone. Taking place across Alserkal Avenue, the festival brings together experimental installations, live performances, exhibitions, workshops, and community-driven programming.

Highlights include Numen/For Use’s TAPE installation inside Concrete, a cocoon-like, participatory structure that dissolves boundaries between sculpture and architecture — alongside a music program led by Yasmine Hamdan, DAM, TootArd, and Gayathri Krishnan. Reel Palestine returns in partnership with Cinema Akil, while sensory-led environments and workshops activate the district for families and younger audiences.

Positioned as both celebration and platform, Quoz Arts Fest transforms the neighborhood into a site of collective experience foregrounding movement, listening, and encounter, and reinforcing Alserkal Avenue’s role as one of the region’s most dynamic cultural ecosystems.

This Week in Culture: Architecture, Myth, and the Ground Beneath Our Feet all at Alserkal Avenue

Flowers as Architecture at UrArtU Gallery

Deconstructing Symbols at Carbon 12

Landscapes Under Pressure at Concrete

Quoz Arts Fest 2026

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This Week in Culture: Architecture, Myth, and the Ground Beneath Our Feet all at Alserkal Avenue

Flowers as Architecture at UrArtU Gallery

Deconstructing Symbols at Carbon 12

Landscapes Under Pressure at Concrete

Quoz Arts Fest 2026

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