The noise of the city—the aggressive hum of Sheikh Zayed Road, the construction cranes pivoting like prehistoric birds, and the polyphonic chatter of a hundred nationalities—usually reaches a fever pitch by the time you get to Alserkal Avenue, which is in the Al Quoz neighborhood of Dubai. Dubai is a city that moves quickly and always looks to the future. So, stepping into the Ishara Art Foundation and seeing a proposal that requires not just a pause but a complete rethinking of time is both disorienting and necessary.
The name of the show is Urdu Worlds, by Ishara Art Foundation and it is, in a quiet way, a revelation. It will run from January 16 to May 31, 2026, and it will be the first modern art show in the United Arab Emirates that is only about the Urdu language. But saying it’s about a language is like saying the map is the territory. Hammad Nasar, who is both a scholar and a poet, put together the show. It is a “visual conversation” between two artists who are separated by time and space but are connected by their spiritual home: the late, famous printmaker Zarina (1937–2020) and the modern multimedia artist Ali Kazim (b. 1979).
In the Gulf, where Urdu is the language of the taxi driver, construction worker, and shopkeeper (and is often hard to tell apart from Hindi), it used to be the “Lashkari,” or camp language. Bringing it into the white cube is a political act. But Urdu Worlds doesn’t fall into the trap of identity politics that tries to teach people. Instead, it sees language as a “world-making” tool that we use to build the inside of our homes when we lose or leave them behind.
The Architecture of Memory in Urdu Worlds
The show starts with a premise that feels especially important in our time of migration and exile: that words don’t just describe the world around us; they also shape our own experiences. Hammad Nasar, the curator, sets up the show with a structure he calls “From Z to A.” This structure encourages a cyclical dialogue instead of a linear history. It’s a mix of modern and contemporary, diasporic and grounded, woodcut and watercolor.
Zarina, who only wanted to be called by her first name, was born in Aligarh, India, in 1937. Aligarh is a university town with a long history of North Indian Islam. Her life was a lesson in moving around. After studying math, she moved to Bangkok, Tokyo, and Paris, where she trained with S.W. Hayter at the famous Atelier-17. She then lived in New York for 40 years. But Aligarh never really left her heart. Or, to be more precise, she was trying to take Aligarh with her.
Zarina’s work is the anchor in Urdu Worlds. Her relationship with Urdu was not academic; it was existential. She famously said, “Urdu is home.” This was because of the 1947 Partition, which left her “too Muslim for the US and India, and too Indian for Pakistan.” Her important portfolio, Home is a Foreign Place (1999), which is a major part of the Ishara Art Foundation and the Prabhakar Collection, powerfully shows this displacement.
There are 36 woodcuts in the work, and each one has a simple geometric ideogram and one word in Urdu. When you stand in front of them, you read a “critical dictionary for home.” There are the physical parts of shelter, like the darwaza (door) and deewar (wall). But there are also the sounds of memory: Barish (rain), Dhool (dust), and Loo (the hot summer breeze). These words are not just general; they have what Nasar calls “cultural weight.” For someone who has spent time in North India during the summer, the word “Loo” brings to mind a certain kind of heaviness and tiredness that no English word can fully capture.
Zarina was brilliant because she could turn these feelings that couldn’t be put into words into shapes. Her line is very straight, which is probably because she studied math. But the handmade paper she used, which she called “paper like skin,” gives the work a fragility that goes against the hardness of the woodblock. The word “Zabaan” can be found in the book Home is a Foreign Place. It means “language” and “tongue,” but in Urdu culture (tehzib), it means honor. To give one’s zabaan is to give one’s word. In Urdu Worlds, Zarina’s minimalist lexicon posits that to inhabit a language is to inherit a code of conduct, a mode of existence that endures despite the erasure of physical coordinates of home by borders or time.
Ali Kazim and the Archaeology of Urdu Worlds
If Zarina’s work is a bird’s-eye view of loss, Ali Kazim’s work is a view from the ground, or maybe even from below. Kazim, who lives in Lahore, Pakistan, bases his version of Urdu Worlds on the physical reality of the Punjab. His work is like digging.
Kazim’s ancestral village is close to the ruins of the ancient Harappan civilization (3300–1300 BCE). He is a walker of these lands and an artist who looks down. During the monsoon season, the rains wash away the topsoil, exposing mounds of sherds, which are pieces of ancient pottery that have been around for thousands of years. His huge four-panel piece Tteela (2025) takes up most of the space in the exhibition.
Tteela shows a landscape “undulating with mounds of sherds” in watercolor pigment on paper, a medium Kazim uses with a subversive, muscular density. These ruins aren’t just empty; as Pakistani writer Mustansar Hussain Tarar says, they are places where time stands still. The fingerprints of a potter who died thousands of years ago are on each sherd. Kazim paints them with an obsessive amount of detail, making a “collective, imagined portrait” of all the people who have lived on this land.
Zarina turns the world into symbols to keep it safe, while Kazim makes a hyper-real archive of its trash. His book Tteela suggests that the “Urdu World” is not just a way of speaking, but also a physical layer of the earth, a layer of history that we walk on. There is an interesting tension in the show: Zarina’s paper is a container for the word, and Kazim’s paper is a container for the soil.
Kazim’s new commission, Alphabets (2025), is a series of 19 etchings and aquatints that will be included in an upcoming artist book called Ali Kazim: Alphabet Book | Urdu Qaida. It goes deeper into this friction. If Home is a Foreign Place is Zarina’s book of feelings, and Alphabets is Kazim’s book of landscapes. Instead of using standard primer pictures to show the letters, he finds the alphabet in “South Asian urban and pastoral landscapes,” like a falling wall, a tree, or a well.
One of the best prints in this series is Girgit (Chameleon) (2025). It shows the “stillness” that Nasar says is the thread that connects the two artists. There is a lot of empty space in the print—a big, breathing void. A chameleon is sitting on a wire fence in the corner, watching a fly. It is a moment of “high noon” predatory tension, so subtle in tone that the viewer has to slow down and hold their breath. It is a masterclass in the power of the “unsaid,” which is something Kazim has in common with the Urdu short story writers he looks up to.
Literary Roots of Urdu Worlds
Literature is an important part of Urdu worlds. The show makes a strong case that visual art in South Asia is closely tied to the culture’s literary heart. The exhibition has a special reading room where you can see how much Zarina and Kazim care about the text.
Zarina’s interaction with the text was both familial and collaborative. The show features Urdu Proverbs (Urdu kay aik so aik mahavray), a book she wrote with her sister, Kishwar Chishti (also known as Rani), who lived in Pakistan in 1991. The sisters live in different cities: one in New York and the other in Lahore. This is like how the subcontinent is divided. Rani chose the proverbs for the book, which was printed in Karachi’s Urdu Bazar, and Zarina drew the pictures.
These proverbs are the DNA of the culture because they hold “cultural cues and references that don’t always translate into English.” For example, Nau sau chuhe khakar billi haj ko chalee (“After eating 900 mice, the cat goes on Hajj”) is a harsh criticism of hypocrisy that only works in a certain cultural setting. Zarina generously gave this book to friends who were raising children in the diaspora. She used her art as a teaching tool to make sure that her “Urdu World” would live on in the next generation.
Ali Kazim’s literary heritage is equally profound, inclined towards the mystical and magical realism. A lot of his work is based on The Conference of the Birds (Mantiq al-Tayr), a 12th-century Sufi poem by Farid-ud-Din Attar. The birds of the world come together in the poem to look for their king, the Simorgh. But they find out that they are the reflection of the divine. Kazim’s 2023 book Hudhud is about the hoopoe bird, which is the guide on this spiritual journey.
Kazim’s moody, foggy landscapes are also influenced by the “New Urdu Short Story” (Naya Afsana), especially the stories of Naiyer Masud. Masud, who was good at writing stories that were hard to understand and “unsaid,” wrote stories like The Occult (Seemiya) that worked in a dream logic, just like Kazim’s watercolor washes. Nasar says that Kazim’s characters, like the white-haired man in Firefly II (2008), seem “oblivious of time,” living in a space that is more literary than real.
The reading room at Ishara, which has these texts next to the art, shows that the “Urdu World” is a world of words as well as pictures. It affirms reading as a mode of viewing and viewing as a mode of reading.
Politics of Language in Urdu-speaking Countries
Putting on Urdu Worlds in Dubai is not just a matter of taste; it is also a cultural correction. A large number of South Asians live in the UAE. Hindi and Urdu are the languages that hold the street together. They are the languages of the “Urdu Cosmopolis,” which goes from the labor camps of Sonapur to the boardrooms of the DIFC. However, this language is not often seen as high culture in the region’s institutions, which tend to switch back and forth between the Anglophone global art market and the Arabophone national narrative.
The Ishara Art Foundation, which Smita Prabhakar started to support contemporary South Asian art, is challenging the “narratives of belonging and exclusion” by putting on a major show just for Urdu. It is recognizing that for millions of people, the “Urdu World” is their main world, even as they travel through the Gulf’s physical geography.
The show makes a point of showing how important it is to keep in touch with our native languages in a time of migration and exile. Zarina’s Travels with Rani (2008), a diptych that shows the sisters’ travels across the subcontinent, has cities like Aligarh, Delhi, and Karachi written in Urdu script. It sounds like a train route that doesn’t care about the political border of 1947 and instead takes back the language’s undivided geography. This map really speaks to people in Dubai, which is a city of people who move around. It implies that home is movable. The Tasbih (prayer beads) carry it. This is another form that Zarina sculpted, linking the repetition of prayer to the repetition of the printmaker’s hand.
A Conversation of Stillness from Z to A
Hammad Nasar, the curator, says that simplicity, stillness, and attention are three things that connect Zarina and Kazim. These qualities are the opposite of what the modern art world often wants.
In Urdu Worlds, the two artists’ conversation is set up to create a “passage between two thoughtful and complex inner worlds.” Zarina’s art is known for its clean lines and empty spaces, while Kazim’s is known for its thick layers of pigment and piles of trash. But they both want the viewer’s time.
Kazim’s Untitled (Mara’s Army II) (2022) makes this stillness more fun. In it, the artist plays the part of a “demonic warrior” from Buddhist mythology, which is one of the things that tries to get the Buddha’s attention. It makes fun of the ego’s distractions, but it also shows how the region’s history is a mix of different religions, like how Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism have blended together like the washes in his watercolor.
An impressive list of lenders, from the Sharjah Art Foundation to Bollywood stars like Sonam Kapoor and Anand Ahuja, is backing the show. This shows that people around the world agree on how important these artists are. But what makes the show really powerful is how private it is.
When you leave the Ishara Art Foundation and step back out into the bright light of Alserkal Avenue, you can hear Dubai again. But the geography inside has changed. Urdu Worlds does what the best art shows do: it changes how people see the world outside the gallery.
The construction workers talking on their phones, the taxi drivers listening to poetry on the radio, and the families walking through the mall are all part of these worlds. Zarina made words into houses because she didn’t have one. Ali Kazim makes monuments out of sherds because he knows that we all go back to the soil.
Hammad Nasar has made a safe place for them by bringing them together. Language is more than just a way to talk; it’s a place to live. For the months that Urdu Worlds is at the Ishara Art Foundation, the Urdu language has found one of its most beautiful homes in the center of Dubai.
