Green Art Gallery in Dubai is hosting 'All the Lands from Sunrise to Sunset,' a group exhibition featuring Alla Abdunabi, Fatma Al Ali, Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck, and Michael Rakowitz. The show explores the persistence of imperial logics and extractive economies through diverse media, including text-based collages, reconstructed artifacts made from food packaging, and archival interventions. By examining acts of naming, erasure, and symbolic circulation, the artists treat empire not as a historical relic but as a mutating contemporary condition.
This exhibition is significant for its critical engagement with Middle Eastern history and its colonial legacies, particularly through the lens of visual culture and material memory. By bringing together established figures like Michael Rakowitz with emerging regional voices, the show highlights how contemporary art in the Gulf is increasingly interrogating geopolitical nomenclature and the authority of colonial archives. It underscores the role of art in deconstructing the 'symbolic afterlives' of domination in a globalized world.