In 2016, the not-for-profit organisation St+art India initiated a transformation of the public spaces in a few neighbourhoods of New Delhi through street art interventions. Almost a decade later, the now-christened Lodhi art district in Lodhi colony remains a prime attraction for all the murals on the walls of its 1940s housing blocks built for government employees. The appeal of street or urban art lies primarily in the vital role it plays in urban regeneration, creating spaces where art can be made accessible for a larger audience, existing alongside the chaos and cacophony of existing urban spaces. Yet, in formalising the street or more radical forms of artistic expression, such interventions invariably create barriers to entry for all. It’s worth questioning if conventional systems of contemporary art discourse can discern value by appraising what is often an ephemeral practice in the gallery space. This inquiry underpins No Trespassing, the exhibition currently on view at the Ishara Art Foundation, curated by Priyanka Mehra, exhibitions manager and programmes curator at the Ishara Art Foundation.

The idea of bringing the show came from my experience of working in urban regeneration formats and also working with street artists and urban art and public art. – Priyanka Mehra

No Trespassing, on view from July 4 – August 30, 2025, turns the crucial juxtaposition and an often unstated dichotomy between the street and gallery onto itself, with the spaces of the Dubai-based institution becoming a street of sorts for six artists from the UAE and South Asia. For the artists, the white cube spaces become a playground in which to intervene, creating site-specific works that imbue an otherwise orderly, staid space with a sense of disarray through their distinct voices. Questioning the often opaque notions institutions uphold about contemporary art and value for contemporary artists, Mehra notes in conversation with STIR, "The idea of bringing the show came from my experience of working in urban regeneration formats and also working with street artists and urban art and public art." Mehra has previously worked on large-scale urban art festivals with St+art, Delhi, and for public art commissions at Yas Bay, Abu Dhabi.

As one enters the first gallery, one first notices that the wall on one end has been eroded, its panels taken apart. Rami Farook's contribution to the show, Gifts (2025), involved exposing the structural intestines of the building in which the foundation is housed; tangibly questioning the meaning we attribute to the white cube. As Farook states in a press release, the removed panels are a 'gift to Ishara’s founder and team' as a symbol of trust, transparency and connection. Opposite Farook's work, H11235 (Kiran Maharjan)'s our anthropocene conundrum (2025) is almost too loud. Building on top of the wall that Farook eroded, the work was created by the team at Ishara, with the Nepalese street artist having been denied a visa to the UAE. The work is an abstract collage made of acrylic sheets, engineered wood, corrugated metal and reclaimed plywood to distil the absent artist's initial concept of intertwined bodily and architectural elements of Nepal and West Asia, rendered in his signature photorealist style.

The second gallery features street artist Fatspatrol's (Fathima Mohiuddin) intervention, The World Out There (2025), that adopts a similar method of deconstructing the intertwined relationship between the white cube and contemporary art as Farook's. The artist brings together discarded street signs and scraps of wood for the work. Bringing the street quite literally into the gallery, Fatspatrol also tags the walls with a dynamic, swirling mural created using brooms. The found objects in Fatspatrol’s installation are objects she finds while walking the streets, collecting them and drawing over them to create her own narratives—an act of reclamation, as the artist puts it. Like Fatspatrol, Sara Alahbabi's practice is informed by walking. Through this method, Alahbabi primarily hopes to subvert the restrictions of a city dominated by a culture of driving, asking what new connections between communities and localities might emerge, as she denotes in her installation, For a Better Modern Something (2025). Depicting the changing urban fabric of Abu Dhabi in printed maps on concrete blocks, LED strips mark the routes she takes through the city, a live network that disregards the imposed order of the streets

Chaos, disorder and a certain irreverence that characterise street art are brought together in the last gallery, which includes Khaled Esguerra and Salma Dib's installations. Whereas Esguerra covers the floor with tiled carbon paper on copier paper, Dib's work, transposed from her preferred medium of MDF boards, takes over the walls. The floor of the gallery, papered over by Esguerra, calls out different words that the artist has seen repeated in construction hoardings and construction site fences advertising the supposed benefits of urban redevelopment schemes in historic areas. Promises of 'heritage', 'legacy' or 'authenticity' mark such projects, in turn resorting to a manufactured patina, capturing only the artifice of history. Such regeneration, often marked by initiatives for urban art, more often than not results in the exclusion of certain people from the spaces where they live and work. The work, tactile in its execution, invites visitors to stomp, tear and disfigure the installation as they like. Under people’s feet, the seeming perfection these words are laden with has been trampled on. Mirroring this act of effacement, Dib's work Generational Wall: Orders and Echoes (2025) emulates the marks that accumulate on walls—half-torn posters, advertisements, tags by unknown artists and even unidentifiable substances. Inspired by the walls of Palestine, Jordan and Syria, the artwork transforms the gallery into a palimpsest of the voices of multiple authors, revealed slowly over time.

The street has long been a space of resistance for artists, everything that the gallery was not: irreverent, disorderly, free of terms and conditions. Transporting this air of freedom to the gallery, Mehra hopes to deconstruct how we look at art, what we talk about and who gets to look at and speak about what art can be. "The point was to initiate genuine conversations about what we perceive art as. When we say that art is for all, then we must also ask, is all art really for all?" she reiterates in conversation. By tapping into the 'aesthetic of the street' and inviting the radical aspects of artistic production into an ecosystem that imposes its own values on what is deemed worthy, No Trespassing attempts to dismantle the idea that trespassers will no longer be welcome.

'No Trespassing' is on view at Ishara Art Foundation in Dubai from July 4 – August 30, 2025.