Tooba Shahbaz | Slow Art Walk
Spend an afternoon visiting the guest exhibitions at Alserkal Avenue.
Aligned with alternative ways of being and understanding, Slow Art Walks invite visitors to take the time to slow down and reflect, not to rush to unpack. For the closing weekend of Alserkal Art Week, we will be joined by critical voices from the arts—both emerging and established—to welcome you to deepen your engagement with contemporary visual arts at Alserkal.
On November 22, Tooba Shahbaz will lead a Slow Art Walk through Alserkal Art Week's guest exhibitions.
We'll meet in The Yard.
Bio
Tooba Shahbaz (b. 1993) is a Pakistani artist based in the UAE, working across drawing, animation, sound, writing, and bookmaking. With a background in architecture, she is interested in the ways spaces are organized, inhabited, and experienced, and how the human and non-human bodies within them adapt to their surroundings. Her practice often moves between the organic and the industrial, exploring questions of transformation, survival, and the sometimes strange relationships we develop with the environments we inhabit.
She holds an MFA from New York University Abu Dhabi (2026), and is an alumna of the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi, where she trained in Fine Arts and Architecture. Her work has been exhibited in the UAE and Pakistan, including most recently: Mutable Devotions at Rizq Art Initiative, Abu Dhabi (2026), A Room of One's Own at NYU Abu Dhabi (2025), and In the Presence of Two at Bayt Al Mamzar, Dubai (2025).
Her broader interests include the grotesque, speculative fiction, horror, and the absurdities of everyday life. She is particularly drawn to things that sit somewhere between the familiar and the unsettling, and to the ways humour, discomfort, and curiosity can coexist.