Dubai, U.A.E. The 10th Quoz Arts Fest by Alserkal, the region’s best-loved arts and culture festival, brought together over 34,000 people from the region’s arts and culture community.
For a decade, the festival has brought together rich concepts from across arts and culture disciplines, and provided a platform for creatives from the region and beyond to showcase their talent. In a multi-cultural city, with a cornucopia of cultural influences, Quoz Arts Fest is a weekend that celebrates our cultural diversity and its reflection through the arts.
This year, the programme was expanded to include a diverse plethora of emerging artists and talents from around the world, hosting more than 200 entertainment and cultural activities including exhibitions, hands-on workshops, art activations, and live performances, and brought together more than 50 creative concepts from across Al Quoz.
The Avenue reverberated as residents and visitors entered Quoz Arts Fest’s thematic ‘Shift Away’, the concept for this year’s edition, which were experienced through three subthemes: Shift to Nature, Shift to Childhood and Shift to Cyborg.
Festival goers marveled at the digital immersive art experience in Concrete, created by Montreal-based digital art studio Iregular, whose work challenges preconceptions and inspires discourse. The installation stayed true to the festival’s theme of Shift Away by transforming visitors to an alternate dimension.
Bu Kolthoum and Saint Levant, who performed in the UAE for the first time, headlined the lineup of musicians. Both artists treated audiences to their most popular tracks and surprised audiences with unreleased material. The lineup was also jam-packed with striking performances from Dubai-based favorites Big Hass, DJ Patchoulee, and Tasty Biscuits.
Quoz Encore, a collaboration between Quoz Arts Fest by Alserkal and The Fridge, saw Seven diverse, homegrown music acts—Lama, Stefan Alm, Jiire Smith, Ramzinho, Kinda, Seaside Feels, and A^2— perform as part of the initiative during the festival weekend.
Spoken word took centre stage with slam poet and author Omar Moussa, who reflects on the immigrant experience through his work. Asma Elbadawi, a spoken word poet and athlete, inspired audiences with her pro-choice advocacy on the hijab in sporting events. Karak Nights, a collective of GCC-based artists, athletes and performers shared their stories to inspire the next generation of aspiring talents.
Over the last 10 years, Quoz Arts Fest by Alserkal has become a platform for emerging and established homegrown creatives across all disciplines. The variety of food concepts from a multitude of cultures, representative of the city the festival calls home.