The Newly-Announced Alserkal Avenue Arts Foundation To Foster Creative Development Through Grants

posted on: Mar 24, 2019

SOURCE: FORBES

BY: ANN BINLOT

In the 11 years since Abdelmonem Bin Eisa Alserkal founded Alserkal Avenue, Dubai’s foremost cultural destination, the visual art scene has blossomed in the United Arab Emirates, cultivating art in the region both locally and internationally, while attracting some of the world’s top creatives to showcase their work in the Middle East. The hub, a collection of industrial buildings located in Al Quoz, a neighborhood situated in Western Dubai, attracted a number of galleries when it first opened, including The Third Line, Ayyam Gallery, and Carbon 12, turning it into a cultural district. “When we founded Alserkal we wanted to create a positive social impact and make a meaningful introduction to arts and culture in the United Arab Emirates and around the region,” said Alserkal in a speech on March 18.

Since 2008, Alserkal and his team have helped fund a number of visual arts collaborations between the cultural district and institutions like the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. In 2017, it launched Concrete, a multidisciplinary space that allows for museum quality exhibitions to be shown there, and the first building in Dubai by Rem Koolhaas’s Office of Metropolitan Architecture. Alserkal Avenue also invited artists and creatives from around the world to get to know Dubai and the region through its on-site residency program. Alserkal decided to put all his efforts into one place, so he established the non-profit Alserkal Avenue Arts Foundation, which was announced on March 18. “This progress led to commissions, to Concrete, to the residency, so the natural progress is to have it all under the umbrella of the foundation,” said Alserkal.

“The Alserkal Arts Foundation supports socially engaged, multi-disciplinary practices and facilitates cross-cultural exchange through its four core initiatives: public art commissions, residencies, research grants, and educational programmes,” reads the foundation’s mission statement. “The Foundation offers cultural practitioners—either based in Dubai—or whose practice critically investigates themes pertinent to the region’s artistic community—opportunities for research, scholarship, and artistic production.”

Along with residencies and programming, the foundation introduces grants of up to $10,000 to both established and emerging cultural practitioners in all areas “who demonstrate a strong interest in pursuing broad, intersectional, and experimental approaches to research in their respective fields.”  The application period for the 2020 grants runs from October 1, 2019 until January 31, 2020. Grants for individuals will be up to $5,000, and for duos and collectives, $10,000. The first recipients of the grants will be announced in fall 2020.

“The idea was, how we can support participatory, ephemeral, conceptual work?” explained Alserkal Avenue director Vilma Jurkute. “To date we’ve welcomed urbanists, geographers—we had our first writer in residence. This interdisciplinary dialogue that’s now been evolving is something that we wanted to grow into an official commitment.”

Both Alserkal and Jurkute hope that the foundation will continue to change Dubai’s reputation for being a city known for brand-new skyscrapers and a healthy appetite for luxury consumption to one that is known for being a cultural producer. “I see it as an opportunity to show that Dubai can be there at the international scene, that Dubai has the caliber, has the talent, to be on the international scene, and I think we are privileged as a team, as a family, as Alserkal Avenue, that we are playing this role, and enabling Dubai to try to among the conceptions, to give the opposite Dubai.” said Alserkal. “It is also ready for a new type of conversation,” added Jurkute.

“For more in depth conversation, in terms of architecture, the heritage that we are building that’s of tomorrow, I think the communities that are being created here. It was always here.”

“Arts and culture encourages curiosity, critical thinking, dialogue—and most importantly tolerance,” said Alserkal in his announcement speech on March 18. “It enables us to build bridges at home and around the world.” The Alserkal Avenue Arts Foundation will continue to build those bridges between Dubai and the rest of the world, allowing for new groups of dreamers to bring their projects to life.