The Only Way Out Is Through: The Twentieth Line
The Third Line, Dubai

Looking back 20 years is a rare undertaking, yet this is the scale at which Dubai’s The Third Line gallery has chosen to reflect. For anyone who has spent time at Alserkal Avenue, The Third Line needs little introduction. Since opening in 2005, at a moment when Dubai’s cultural infrastructure was still tentative and often viewed with skepticism, the gallery has become one of the most consistent presences in the city’s art ecology. What now reads as an assured commitment to artists from the Middle East, North Africa, and the wider Global South was, in its early years, closer to a gamble. Championing practices that did not fit neatly into Western market expectations was not the obvious path to sustainability. Yet this insistence on carving out space beyond inherited hierarchies has come to define the gallery’s program.

The anniversary exhibition steered away from any navel-gazing, instead situating the gallery’s trajectory within the larger upheavals of the past two decades: the optimism and excess of the mid-2000s; the global financial crisis; the Arab Spring; prolonged regional conflict; the pandemic; and the current sense of overlapping political and ecological uncertainty. Curated by Shumon Basar, the exhibition was titled “The Only Way Out Is Through,” a poetic phrase in line with a certain spirit central to The Third Line’s identity, beginning with the gallery’s own name, borrowed from a verse by the Iranian Sufi mystic Shams-e Tabrizi that suggests an alternative path when binary logic fails.