The Third Line celebrates twentieth anniversary and Dubai's art success

The Third Line is currently presenting The Only Way Out Is Through: The Twentieth Line, a project curated by Shumon Basar (Sept. 18-Nov. 7).

- Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer

Faran Al Qasimi's composition Sandcastles.

The exhibition marks the gallery's 20th anniversary. Taking inspiration from the phrase often invoked in times of hardship—both as an endurance mantra and a fatalistic admission of reality — The Only Way Out Is Through looks back on two decades of The Third Line's story in relation to global cultural, political, and economic shifts through a retrospective exhibition, a programme of conversations, and “Flash Sales Specials”, which is a series of 48-hour popup sales of thematically grouped, long-unseen works from the gallery’s archive.

The exhibition component features every artist currently represented by The Third Line, with early and recent works drawn from the gallery's extensive two-decade archive, much of which has not been shown to the public. Many of the early works reveal how some artists’ practices have evolved over the years, while others show artists whose visual language and concerns had matured and have remained strikingly consistent. Selected pieces are arranged into four chronological sections — 2005 to 2009/ 2010 to 2015/ 2016 to 2020/ and 2021to 2025 — each contextualised by a timeline running across the gallery's floors that delineates key political, economic, and cultural moments, ranging from the global financial crisis, through uprisings across the Arab world and the COVID-19 pandemic, to the present moment characterised by interlocked global crises.