All welcome, pre-registration required

The Community Assembly is a series of weekly, discipline-specific gatherings that run across the Youth Takeover 2026: Not the Season, 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.

Structured through exercises, prompts, and performances, the session is co-facilitated with Off the Grid and shaped by their approach as a process-led creative salon. Participants are invited to move between roles as thinkers, makers, performers and peers, contributing to an open environment that evolves through shared activities.

Rooted in grassroots and independent theatre-making, the session foregrounds self-organised and community-led practices, reflecting how the performing arts scene is built through collaboration and informal networks.

Through doing and reflecting, the session aims to creates spaces for new connections and shared ways of working to emerge.

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

Abhirami Suresh is the Curatorial Projects Manager, Learning, at Art Jameel and Curator of the Youth Assembly programme. Working with the Learning, Exhibitions and Programming teams, she develops projects that prioritise youth communities, research and experimental pedagogies, creating space for emerging voices and alternative forms of knowledge. Abhirami’s work has been presented at internationally at the Karama Arts Club, Dubai (2025), Curatorial Fellowship with Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2022), Young Curator Residency with the Ras Al Khaimah Fine Arts Festival (2022), London Design Biennale (2021) and the Ford Foundation Grant (2020). She was a speaker as part of the ICOM Young Professionals Network at the ICOM General Conference (2025).

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.

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