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For one weekend each January, Al Quoz reveals the full extent of its cultural density. Warehouses become stages, alleyways turn into meeting points, and the city’s creative pulse feels suddenly more palpable.
Quoz Arts Fest returns for its 14th edition on Saturday 24 and Sunday 25 January 2026. Once again transforming Alserkal Avenue and the wider Al Quoz Creative Zone into a walkable landscape of art, sound, food and collective experience.
Long known for its open-door atmosphere and multi-layered programming, the festival continues to build on a simple idea: culture works best when it’s accessible, participatory, and embedded in elevating the magic found in everyday life. This year’s edition deepens that ethos with projects that foreground movement, listening, and public encounter alongside a programme that balances established names with emerging regional voices.
“Over the years, Quoz Arts Fest has grown alongside Dubai’s creative community creating a space where artists, neighbours, and visitors can move, gather, and explore new forms of connection,” Basmah El Bittar, Director of Alserkal Avenue reflects. “The 2026 edition highlights the depth of regional talent. Artists whose work reflects the pulse, perspective and creative energy of the region and brings together the local artisans whose craft and culinary expressions shape the cultural fabric of the festival.”
Part of Quoz Arts Fest’s enduring appeal is its ability to cater to different kinds of audiences without flattening the experience. Visitors can move between experimental installations, live performances, exhibitions, workshops, talks, film screenings, community activations and food pop-ups at their own pace. Families are equally considered: children can explore thoughtfully designed sensory environments, while older audiences might spend hours moving between performances, conversations and installations.
Music remains one of the festival’s strongest entry points, as everyone who attended the memorable 2023 Saint Levant performance would reminisce. The 2026 programme brings together artists whose practices sit at the intersection of heritage, experimentation and contemporary storytelling.
Headlining the programme are Lebanese singer-songwriter Yasmine Hamdan as part of her I remember I forget tour, and Palestinian hip-hop pioneers DAM, both artists whose work carries political, emotional and cultural weight without sacrificing sonic innovation. They are joined by TootArd, Gayathri Krishnan, and the specially commissioned collaborative performance From the Lips to the Moon, hosted by Pouya Ehsaei and Tara Fatehi, which unfolds as a recurring spoken-word and sound experience shaped by improvisation and gesture.
Across the weekend, Stage 2.0 continues the festival’s commitment to emerging talent, offering a platform dedicated to UAE-based and regional musicians experimenting with new forms, collaborations, and formats.
Rather than positioning artworks as static objects, this year’s programme leans toward practices that are spatial, performative and participatory.
A standout moment is TAPE Dubai by Numen/For Use, presented at Concrete for the first time in the city. Internationally presented in cities such as Paris, Tokyo and Milan, the installation’s arrival in Alserkal Avenue marks a significant moment for experiential, large-scale installation in the local context.
The internationally recognised collective transforms the space into a suspended, cocoon-like structure constructed from layers of elastic tape. Visitors are invited to enter and move through the installation, blurring distinctions between architecture, sculpture and bodily experience. Performances will also take place inside the structure, further activating the work as a living environment rather than a fixed object. Built through collective making and activated through movement, the work captures much of what Quoz Arts Fest has come to represent: art as shared space, rather than spectacle.
Elsewhere across the Avenue and surrounding warehouses, visitors can encounter a curated mix of visual projects, experimental formats and site-responsive works that extend the festival’s interest in how art functions within public space.
Several long-running community programmes return in 2026. Reel Palestine, presented in partnership with Cinema Akil, brings a programme of independent Palestinian film alongside a vibrant souk featuring artisans, designers and culinary vendors rooted in Palestinian cultural practice. The programme opens with the UAE premiere of Once Upon a Time in Gaza by Arab and Tarzan Nasser, and features 11 feature-length films, 5 short films, and 29 screenings, including two Academy Award-shortlisted titles Palestine 36 (2025) and All That’s Left of You (2025) by Cherien Dabis.
Families can also visit Jossa Warehouse 45, transformed into a sensory-led environment designed specifically for children. Through tactile materials, soft structures and imaginative zones, the space invites younger audiences to explore through movement and play — reinforcing the festival’s inclusive approach to cultural participation.
A multimedia presentation by Mawaheb, featuring work by adults of determination, further underscores the festival’s ongoing commitment to accessibility and representation.
Fourteen editions in, Quoz Arts Fest continues to evolve without losing its grounding in community. What distinguishes it is not scale, but stance: a sustained refusal of the closed-door logic that still governs much of the art world. Instead, the festival positions culture in the open across courtyards, warehouses, alleyways and thresholds using Alserkal’s architecture not as backdrop but as infrastructure for encounter. Art here is not sequestered or rarefied; it is encountered through movement, conversation, proximity. Less an event to attend than a condition to enter. Quoz Arts Fest gestures toward a different cultural model for the city where public space becomes a site of shared authorship rather than passive spectatorship.
