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.

This session, focused on Sound and Music brings together initiatives, collectives, record labels and communities in music and sound through a shared environment of listening, calibration, and improvisation. At its centre is a reference garden, where these collectives contribute materials that reflect their sonic practices, from tracks and playlists to visual references and physical media. These are arranged in relation to one another, forming a landscape of influences and practices.

The space is activated with live mixing stations, where participants can use these materials in real time. Sounds are sampled, layered, and recomposed, creating a personalized tracks shaped through improvisation and collective response.

Additional elements, including radio-style broadcasts and live visual projections, extend the session into a multi-sensory experience. Participants are invited to move through the space, listen across different nodes and encounter music as a shared and shifting process.

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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