No Trespassing

No Trespassing marks Ishara Art Foundation’s first summer exhibition. Curated by Priyanka Mehra, the show channels the aesthetics of the streets into a white cube space. Through distinct practices, six UAE-based and South Asian artists explore their relationship with the street, engaging with it as both subject and medium.

Rather than attempting to define the street, the exhibition underlines its resistance to definition. More than simply a setting, it is a collection of individual experiences that alternate between chaotic and orderly, gritty and beautiful, uninhibited and curated. Signposts, building materials, pavements, lights, street art, scrap-heaps and human traces become inscriptions of a city’s movement. No Trespassing looks at the streets as a site of deconstruction and reinvention, continually shaping and being shaped by those who pass through them.

The exhibition explores what it means to speak of art in, on and from the street. The participating artists have created their works through on-site interventions, a form of mark-making that mirrors the interaction of a city with its inhabitants. By "tagging” the walls and floors of a formal exhibition space, the artists claim it as their own – challenging the perception that institutionalised forms of artistic expression hold greater cultural value.

No Trespassing invites audiences to step into a dialogue between the street and the institution, reimagining how we move through – and leave our mark on – the spaces we inhabit.

The exhibition features works by Fatspatrol (Fathima Mohiuddin), H11235 (Kiran Maharjan), Khaled Esguerra, Rami Farook, Salma Dib and Sara Alahbabi.

The exhibition has been generously supported by reframe.

About the Curator

Priyanka Mehra is the Exhibitions Manager and Programmes Curator at the Ishara Art Foundation and the Curator of No Trespassing. With a background in design, she has navigated diverse roles in the arts that include public art commissions in the UAE, urban regeneration programmes in India and conceptualising Public Art Masterplans in the KSA.She has worked on large-scale urban art festivals such as St+art Delhi, Public Art Commissions at Yas Bay, Abu Dhabi, and as project director for globally renowned site-specific artist Daku.