All welcome, pre-registration required

The Community Assembly is a series of weekly, discipline-specific gatherings that run across the Youth Takeover 2026, bringing together practitioners and audiences around shared areas of creative practice to develop a space for exchange, presentation and conversation.

Positioned as recurring public gathering across the exhibition duration, each Assembly invites participants to engage directly with the ideas explored in Not the Season through different forms and disciplines. Each session is anchored by a practitioner or organisation active within the UAE’s cultural ecosystem, ensuring that conversations emerge from lived practice rather than conventional framings.

Open to both invited participants and the public, the Community Assembly aim to foster new connections, surface working methods, and build a growing network of collaborators that extend beyond.

This Community Assembly focuses on film and moving image as a space for reflection, documentation and storytelling, bringing together filmmakers and audiences to explore how moving image practices engage with criticality, language and collaboration.

The session opens with a curated screening of short films by UAE-based practitioners. This is followed by a guided discussion experience led by Frame Fellow, creating space for dialogue around process, authorship and the role of film within contemporary cultural contexts. Co-curated with Frame Fellow and Assembly members Saina Bidshahri and Vaishnavi Pramodh, the session reflects collective interests in filmmaking and the moving image as medium and method. Participants are encouraged to engage, reflect and connect with others working across film and adjacent practices.

This programme is organised by Abhirami Suresh, Curator of The Assembly and Jared Maxilom, Youth Engagement Fellow, as part of the Youth Takeover 2026.

Frame Fellow is a community-driven platform for moving image and alternative cinema co-founded by Yoonsik Chico Park and Martin Yambao, focusing on artists whose works exist outside the mainstream. The platform fosters an open, peer-driven approach, inviting both emerging and established artists to share their work. The initiative presents a dynamic programme of film screenings in dialogue with live sound performances, alongside discussions and collaborations that aim to engage the wider creative community. Frame Fellow provides a space for artists to connect, discover new works and share creative practices that are often underrepresented in conventional screening programmes.

Yoonsik Chico Park is an artist based in Abu Dhabi. Working across performance, installation, sculpture and image, his practice explores personal agency and existential tension within society through staged encounters with object, ritual, gesture, and silence in everyday and liminal space. Chico was a recipient of the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artist Fellowship (2024-5) and the NYU Abu Dhabi Postgraduation Research Fellowships (2023-4). He holds a BA in Philosophy from NYU Abu Dhabi, where he studied Philosophy and Theater.

Jared Jimenez Maxilom is the Youth Engagement Fellow 2025-2026 and alumnus of The Assembly’s 2024-2025 cohort. He is Filipino poet based in Sharjah whose practice spans poetry, performance and research. His work combines text, found materials, ephemeral gestures and communal authorship to create durational encounters that constitute shared space. His poetry has appeared in AGNI, Thrush Poetry Journal, NO NIIN, Postscript Magazine and The Kingfisher. He has performed work at Alserkal Avenue, Jameel Arts Centre, NYU Abu Dhabi, Emirates Literature Foundation, Mohammed bin Rashid Library and Museum of the Future, among others.