Do not miss these four exhibitions in the region and beyond this week.

Summer’s Lab: Open Studio with Loutfi Souidi, Le Cube, Rabat

Loutfi Souidi presents the results of the research he started during the summer’s lab at Rabat’s Le Cube – Independent Art Room. As part of his summer’s lab, Souidi has developed a new project, Je veux être artiste, which focuses on the notions of punishment, learning, repetition and destiny. By taking concrete situations from his daily life, linked to his childhood or his life as a young artist as a starting point and reacting to them, Souidi sheds light on the irrationality of certain contexts and their impact on our future lives.

The exhibition closes on 22 January 2021.

Mapping Sanctuaries, P21 Gallery, online

London-based P21 Gallery presents a collection of Alaa Alsaraji’s digital illustrations and sound pieces exploring the notions of safety and the spaces that exist between isolation and belonging within Muslim communities. The exhibition aims to platform the voices of British Muslims from different backgrounds to illustrate what these spaces look like, feel like and what they provide physically and emotionally for these communities.

The exhibition closes on 15 January 2021.

See the exhibition here.

Tarek Atoui: Cycles in 11, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah

As a long-term collaboration with Sharjah Art Foundation, Cycles in 11 presents Tarek Atoui’s investigation of innovative and experimental musical forms, offering viewers the opportunity to delve deeper into what goes behind instrument-making, compositional structure and musical collaboration. The works on view have developed over a decade as part of Atoui’s ongoing exploration of different methods of listening, composition and performance. In tandem with this exhibition, the heritage house Bait Al Serkal in Sharjah is conceived as both a sound lab and a performance space informed by local traditions of hospitality. The exhibition project will be further developed as a residency programme for musicians, composers and artists, extended into 2022.

The exhibition closes on 10 April 2021.

Art in Isolation: Creativity in the Time of COVID-19, MEI’s Art Gallery, Washington, D.C.

MEI’s Art Gallery presents a group exhibition titled Art in Isolation, as a tribute to the shared experiences of artists and creatives from the ‘Middle East’ (West Asia) and its diaspora. Following an open-call, artists have submitted their proposals of artworks that tackled the theme of ‘sheltering in place’ during a global pandemic. As a result, the exhibition brought together the work of 39 emerging and established artists investigating the impact of isolation on artists and their artistic practice.

Browse the displayed artworks online.

The exhibition closes on 29 January 2021.

Featured image: Loutfi Souidi, ‘Qoffa’ (2018).