The Assembly invites you to the annual Youth Takeover at the Jameel Arts Centre starting Saturday, May 16 and running until Monday, June 8, 2025.

The Assembly 2025 – 2026 cohort members are: artist and creative technologist Ahmed Bilal, multidisciplinary artist Andres Ugartechea, architect and researcher Dina Barqawi, researcher Mahasin Ismail, graphic designer Poorvaja Subramanian, professional dancer Rei Co, artist and researcher Saiki Padhy, photographer and filmmaker Saina Bidshahri, and filmmaker Vaishnavi Pramodh.

The Youth Takeover manifests as a physical takeover of the liminal spaces of Jameel Arts Centre’s ground floor, featuring multiple audiovisual and artwork interventions that stretch both indoors and outdoors. The Takeover is further complemented by a rich public programme spanning the duration of the exhibition.

This year’s theme, titled Not the Season, presents a spring as a tool for mapping tangible and intangible terrains; continuously linking its physical and metaphysical properties and asking what the act of manipulating a spring signifies across different conceptual landscapes. This exhibition becomes a playground for The Assembly to test the spring to its limits and to ask: how far can it stretch?

For this Takeover, the exhibited works and newly commissioned pieces come together to produce new expansions, deformations and breaks to the spring. The artists are:

Ahmed Bilal with Ameera Alharmoodi and Sara Kamar and Fabin Rasheed
Andres Ugartechea with Arnold Barretto and Mivan Makia
Dina Barqawi with Ali Huraimil and Talal Al Najjar
Mahasin Ismail with Chidirim Nwaubani and The Milele Museum
Rei Co with Fran Raymundo, Kyla Munro and Donna Penny and Lisa Rowley, Mohi Mohsen and Rama Khalifeh
Saiki Padhy with Adele Bea Cipste and Rawan Mohi
Saina Bidshahri with Muhannad Al Salmani and Sayed Moussavi
Vaishnavi Pramodh with Bao and Mona Ayyash and Nadine Ghandour

The exhibition’s visual identity and scenographic elements have been conceptualised and designed by Poorvaja Subramanian.

Not the Season holds its tensions in suspension. These works oscillate: expanding, compressing, folding back into themselves, resisting coherence as they slip between material and metaphor, structure and sensation. Like the spring that frames the exhibition, they generate momentum through difference. Here, the spring might expand, change, deform, exhaust, buckle, or even break, storing within it a capacity to respond. The Assembly has built and stretched the spring in their own ways, arriving at distinct enquiries. What you encounter depends on how you engage: pull, release, follow, or trace where it frays. Think of these questions with a spring in mind; just not the season. Stretch them.

Besides the commissioned artworks, the Youth Takeover 2026 features public programmes that activate the exhibition as a site of engagement, inviting audiences to encounter the spring through participatory, discursive and experiential conditions, including workshops, performances, talks and interactive sessions.

Saturday, May 16:
–    Opening Preview and Not the Season panel discussion with the Assembly 2025-2026 members and programme curators Abhirami Suresh, Sanjushrree Subash and Jared Maxilom
–    Activation: Between Seasons: Unfolding Places by artist Kesang Chuki

Friday, May 22:
–    Tour: Assembly-led Youth Takeover 2026 Walk-shop by Assembly members Dina Barqawi, Mahasin Ismail and Rei Co

Saturday, May 23:
–    Workshop: Making Artworks that are not Mine to Begin With by artist Majid Majidi
–    Workshop: Mapping what was Lost by artist-researcher Nisma Hamid
–    Film Screening and Gathering: Community Assembly – Film and Moving Image with Frame Fellows and Assembly members Saina Bidshahri and Vaishnavi Pramodh

Sunday, May 24:
–    Participatory Performance: The Pour by Assembly member Dina Barqawi

Friday, May 29:
–    Tour: Assembly-led Youth Takeover 2026 Walk-shop by Assembly members Ahmed Bilal, Saiki Padhy and Saina Bidshahri

Saturday, May 30:
–    Performance Workshop: Infinite Movement by performance artist Vish
–    Performance Lecture: Of Places and/in Time by artists Ali Talaat and Alina El Assadi
–    Workshop and Gathering: Community Assembly – Performing Arts and Theatre with Off the Grid

Sunday, May 31:
–    Workshop: Family Sundays at the Jameel by Assembly members Poorvaja Subramanian and Vaishnavi Pramodh
–    Workshop: The Telephone at the Edge of the World – A Storytelling & Making Experience by multidisciplinary creative Dinika Govender
–    Workshop: Pawns Don’t Move Backwards: Decoding Rationalisation Through Chess by artist Carlos Paez Gonzalez

Friday, June 5:
–    Tour: Assembly-led Youth Takeover 2026 Walk-shop by Assembly members Andres Ugartechea, Poorvaja Subramanian and Vaishnavi Pramodh

Saturday, June 6:
–    Workshop: Mind to Map – Translating Thought into Form by artist-researcher Meera Abdulrahim Salem
–    Performance: Strings/∅ –  An Ambient Listening Experience by performance artist Lucio Avanceña
–    Musical Activation and Gathering: Community Assembly – Sound & Music

The Assembly is an annual experimental learning programme designed to foster creative leaders aged 18 to 24 in the UAE, inviting the creation and curation of projects reflective of their generation’s areas of interest. The learning programme was designed, curated and facilitated by Abhirami Suresh, Curatorial Projects Manager at Art Jameel, in collaboration with Sanjushree Subash, Assembly Peer Curator 2025 – 2026 and Jared Maxilom, Youth Engagement Fellow 2025 – 2026, both alumni of The Assembly 2024 – 2025.

SEE ALL EVENTS