Abdelmonem Bin Eisa Alserkal
Leaders & Founders · Middle East“Alserkal built Dubai's Alserkal Avenue from a former industrial site in 2007 into the Gulf's leading independent arts district.”
Why Abdelmonem Bin Eisa Alserkal is in the Design 100
Alserkal built Alserkal Avenue out of a cluster of rented warehouses in Al Quoz, Dubai’s industrial district of garages and print shops. What began there from 2007 grew, gallery by gallery, into a compound now home to more than sixty galleries, studios and cultural organisations, among them Ayyam Gallery, Carbon 12 and Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, and Concrete, the venue Rem Koolhaas’s OMA completed as its first built project in the UAE.
That scale matters less than what it gave the region first: a physical address for contemporary art before most Gulf institutions had one. The Alserkal Arts Foundation has since extended the model into residencies and public commissions for artists across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, while Alserkal himself sits on acquisition committees at the British Museum, Tate and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Infrastructure first, patronage second, is what the Design 100 recognises here.