Sometimes, a stitch rebels. A single wild thread, placed with knowing hands, strays from the pattern—leaving its mark, whispering a quiet resistance. From this wild stitch, a new weave emerges.

This Alserkal Art Week, we present A Wild Stitch, a public programme that gathers voices challenging the single grand narrative, carefully threading space for multiplicity, hybridity, and alternative perspectives that refuse to be neatly stitched into place.

At the heart of the week is Vanishing Points, a major exhibition by Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi at Concrete. Drawing from his training in Indo-Persian miniature painting, Qureshi expands into photographs, installations, video, and paintings that reject the fixed gaze of European realism. Instead, he offers a world where meaning is fluid, and the centre is everywhere.

Across the Avenue, public art commissions curated by Fatoş Üstek unfold under the theme Between a Beach and Slope, inspired by a poem of the same name by Emirati artist Nujoom Alghanem. Alghanem’s photographic intervention, The Desert of Liwa, will mark the Avenue’s corner façade, inviting a contemplative dialogue between the self and the surrounding landscape. In The Yard, Indian artist Shilpa Gupta’s light-text sculpture, Still They Know Not What I Dream, bears the weight of silence and resistance.

Continuing the dialogue, the Majlis Talks, curated by Stephanie Bailey, presents Crit Club—a performance project by Cem A of @freeze_magazine—featuring talks that engage with the unrealistic questions and impossible positions that hover over the art scene.

Beyond, the Avenue unfolds with over 15 new exhibitions, and a series of intimate artist talks, workshops, screenings, open studios, and walkthroughs.