Summons to summer with Ishara Art Foundation's 'No Trespassing' show

'No Trespassing' marks Ishara Art Foundation's first summer exhibition (July 4-Aug. 30). Curated by Priyanka Mehra, it channels the aesthetics of the streets into a white cube space. Six UAE-based and South Asian artists explore their relationship with the street, engaging with it as both subject and as a medium.

- Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer

Rather than attempting to define the street, the exhibition resists such definition, and more than a setting, the show is a collection of individual experiences that alternate between chaotic and orderly, gritty and beautiful, uninhibited and curated-much as street life. Mehra is Exhibitions Manager and Programmes Curator at the Foundation.

Signposts, building materials, pavements, lights, street art, scrapheaps 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 live in and 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 onsite interventions, a kind of mark-making that mirrors the interaction of a city with its inhabitants. Upon entering the exhibition, the viewer encounters a large-scale mixed-media work by H11235 (Kiran Maharjan). As the artist was unable to be present onsite to create the piece, he explores the possibilities of mark-making from a distance. The work signals the void left by his absence.