Alserkal Avenue’s “Galleries Nights”
By Kevin Jones
Flux. It’s a word commonly used to describe Dubai’s construction-crazed urban environment, its teeming waves of here-today-gone-tomorrow expats and its relentlessly renewed quest for the bolder, brighter and bigger. Perhaps more than any other, Dubai is a city built by “flux.”
The city’s cultural nerve center, Alserkal Avenue, a neighborhood of galleries smack at the heart of a heaving industrial zone, is having a flux moment of its own. A booming expansion that will endow the hub with 40 additional spaces, practically doubling its existing size, is careening towards completion. Promise of a cascade of summertime “soft” openings peppered the conversations of the many gallery-hoppers who turned out for the first of this year’s Galleries Nights—the bi-monthly evening of vernissages at Alserkal Avenue. Under a night sky punctuated by gently swaying cranes and grid-like building skeletons, flux was almost everywhere to be seen, cavorting in all its finery.
