Déjà Vu, a multi-gallery exhibition conceptualised by Alserkal, will open in Concrete on Saturday, 25 April. The 14-day selling exhibition, featuring 50+ artists represented by 20 of the UAE’s leading contemporary art galleries, is a collective initiative designed to provide a commercial opportunity for the galleries, which have been impacted by current events. The exhibition, the first of its kind in the UAE, has been curated by Kevin Jones – Artistic Director at Alserkal, Nada Raza – Director of Alserkal Arts Foundation, and Zaina Zaarour – Curator & Manager of Programmes at Alserkal Avenue, in consultation with participating galleries.
Inspired by Raed Yassin’s neon work, Déjà Vu (2016), the exhibition unpacks the incongruity and inanity of repeated cycles in three streams — the uncanny as it presents in historical mismatching and memory glitches; historical absurdity; and linguistic slippage.
The uncanny goes beyond the broadly understood cognitive ‘mismatch’ to examine the surrealism that pervades moments of “déjà vu” as we experience them. The curatorial intent is to delve into the gap between the real and the perceived, the conscious and the imagined.
Historical absurdity explores Karl Marx’s classic assertion in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) that history repeats itself “first as tragedy, second as farce”. More particularly, the show examines the indexes that people living in the region have of geopolitical tension and conflagration, and how their memories are accessed and altered in the face of new struggles, often experienced as glitched familiarity or mis-memory.
Linguistic slippage looks at how language becomes an unreliable tool for correspondence, connection, and factual record in the face of conflicting narratives, calling the intended use of words, signs and symbols into question and leaving the foundations of communication unstable and untrustworthy.
The exhibition will feature works by more than 50 of the region’s contemporary artists, including Samira Abbassy, Sadik Alfraiji, Nabil Anani, Ammar Al Attar, Mirna Bamieh, Lubna Choudhary, Samuel Fosso, Anahita Razmi, Larissa Sansour, Mithu Sen, Seher Shah, Slavs and Tatars, Lantian Xie, and Raed Yassin, among others.
Participating galleries are: Gallery Isabelle, The Third Line, Green Art Gallery, Lawrie Shabibi, Ayyam Gallery, Carbon12, 1×1 Art Gallery, Grey Noise, Zawyeh Gallery, Efie Gallery, Taymour Grahne Projects, Aisha Alabbar Gallery, Waddington Custot, Leila Heller Gallery Dubai, Firetti Contemporary, Satellite, Iris Projects, NIKA Project Space, Tabari Artspace, and Total Arts.
The exhibition will remain on show at Concrete in Alserkal Avenue until 10PM on 8 May 2026.