SHARES

How a Dubai gallery shaped a region — and what its anniversary exhibition reveals about the future.

A City Built on Speed, A Gallery Built on Persistence

Dubai often presents itself in fast-forward: towers rising overnight, neighbourhoods reinventing themselves before residents finish their morning coffee. Yet through this rapid metamorphosis, a small number of cultural anchors have quietly, steadily laid the foundations for an artistic community. Chief among them is The Third Line, celebrating twenty years with its expansive anniversary exhibition, The Only Way Out Is Through.

Curated by Shumon Basar, the show is less a retrospective than a mirror: held up to both the gallery and the city that shaped it. It reflects ambition, vulnerability, humour, contradictions — and above all, the urgency of telling stories from a region long misread by the world.

Beginnings in a Difficult Era

When co-founders Sunny Rahbar, Claudia Cellini, and Omar Ghobash opened The Third Line in 2005, they were responding to a global climate coloured by post-9/11 suspicion and reductive narratives around the Middle East. Regional artists were often framed through geopolitics rather than creativity.

The gallery stood as counterpoint — a space insisting that artists from the UAE, Iran, North Africa and the broader diaspora belong firmly in contemporary discourse. Their participation in major art fairs from Basel to New York helped dismantle old tropes and placed MENA artists on the global stage as intellectual equals.

Inside the Exhibition: A Twenty-Year Conversation

The Only Way Out Is Through features 74 works by all 31 artists represented by the gallery. Walking through the show feels like flipping through a collective memoir — one with many authors, many countries, many emotional textures.

The Everyday as Archive

Artists like Farah Al Qasimi, Bady Dalloul, and Lamya Gargash capture the visual language of Gulf life: neon interiors, delivery drivers, grand mosques, glittering malls and modest kitchens. These are the places where ordinary life and quiet surrealism coexist.

The Past as Shadow, the Future as Question

Works by Hayv Kahraman, Huda Lutfi, Shirin Aliabadi, and Tarek Al-Ghoussein dive into identity, gender politics, war memory and cultural inheritance. Some pieces carry the weight of loss — especially those by artists who have passed, their presence felt in powerful final gestures.

The Thrill of the Unexpected

Surprising pairings — such as street-photography energy beside sculptural introspection — echo the gallery’s history of mixing genres and geographies. The show replicates the feeling of encountering something familiar yet newly charged.

A Timeline Underfoot: Art in the Age of ‘Polycrisis’

Perhaps the most striking curatorial gesture is the timeline running across the exhibition floor. Starting in 2005, it maps global and regional events that shaped both the gallery and the world:

  • the 2008 financial crash

  • the rise of Bitcoin

  • wars in Gaza

  • the pandemic

  • the Beirut port explosion

  • the COP21 climate accords

This visual spine refuses to separate art from lived reality. It acknowledges the discomfort of making creativity within constant upheaval — and the resilience required to persist.

In Basar’s words, we are living in an age of polycrises: overlapping emergencies, each amplifying the other. Against this backdrop, the exhibition title The Only Way Out Is Through resonates with both determination and fatigue.

What Comes After Twenty Years?

Anniversaries are comfortable moments to look back — but this show looks forward. It raises subtle questions:

  • How might the gallery’s roster evolve as Gulf demographics shift?

  • Will future exhibitions expand into South Asian, African, or Southeast Asian dialogues?

  • How will regional institutions navigate a world defined by instability?

The Third Line’s first twenty years built the scaffolding for Dubai’s art ecosystem. The next twenty may redefine how the region imagines itself — not in reaction to the world, but in collaboration with it, on its own terms.

For now, the exhibition stands as both a chapter ending and a beginning: a vivid testament to a gallery — and a city — still in the process of becoming.

Suggested Picture Options

Here are visuals that would fit perfectly in a magazine layout.
(These are descriptions you can use to find or select images.)

  1. Installation view of the exhibition

    • Wide shot of The Only Way Out Is Through showing multiple works and the floor timeline.

  2. Portrait of the founders

    • Image of Sunny Rahbar, Claudia Cellini, and Omar Ghobash at the early gallery or in the current Alserkal Avenue space.

  3. Farah Al Qasimi – Changing Room (2019)

    • Vibrant, intimate photograph of Arab American women styling a pageant queen.

  4. Bady Dalloul – One Man Show (2024)

    • Collage showcasing textures of “old Dubai” — taxis, phone cards, Karama signs, Bollywood imagery.

  5. Historic archival photo of The Third Line's first warehouse space

    • Adds a sense of origin, grit and early ambition.

  6. Shirin Aliabadi – Girls in a Car (2005)

    • Joyful and subversive moment of Iranian girls posing under a camera flash.

If you want, I can generate curated image group displays with these themes.