Jack Persekian: Jerusalem – Take II at Zawyeh Gallery, Dubai — A Visual Archaeology of a City That Never Stops Changing

Some artists photograph a city; Jack Persekian excavates one. Jack Persekian: Jerusalem – Take II at Zawyeh Gallery, Dubai opens on 14 November 2026 in Alserkal Avenue and runs until 10 January 2027, arriving at the start of Dubai’s busiest art week. The gallery describes the project as an exercise in “visual archaeology” — a way of bringing to the surface histories buried in the landscape of a city that has been represented, rebuilt and imagined more than almost any other.

The curator who returned to the image

For much of the art world, Persekian’s name is attached to institutions rather than to works on a wall. Born in Jerusalem in 1962 into an Armenian family and raised in the Old City near New Gate, he founded Anadiel Gallery in 1992 and the Al-Ma’mal Foundation, and launched The Jerusalem Show in 2007. He served as artistic director and head curator of the Sharjah Biennial from 2004 to 2011 and as founding director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, co-founded Qalandiya International in 2012, and directed the Palestinian Museum from 2012 to 2015. He has taught at the Royal College of Art and received the Palestine Order of Merit for Culture, Sciences and Arts in 2016.

Running beneath that curatorial career is a self-taught artistic practice. In his 2021 exhibition Past Tense with Zawyeh in Ramallah, he laid present-day photographs over early-twentieth-century views of Jerusalem taken from the same vantage points. The new show’s title, “Take II,” invites visitors to read it as a second pass at the same city — a reading the press release supports without spelling out.

Against the postcard: what “Take II” argues

According to Zawyeh’s exhibition text, the works pair images of past and present to unsettle three familiar ways of seeing Jerusalem: the nostalgic, the mythical and the colonial. Each, in its own way, imagines the city as a sacred stage detached from the people who actually live there. Persekian’s counter-image, as the press release puts it, reveals “a city whose landscape and identity have never ceased to change.”

A central claim of the exhibition is that preservation is never neutral. Deciding what to restore, what to leave as ruin and what to photograph as heritage privileges some histories and silences others. For a curator who has spent decades building platforms for Palestinian art, this is not an abstract point: the archive itself becomes a site of contest.

Limestone, rooftops and the beauty of the everyday

What keeps the show from becoming purely polemical is its attention to beauty. The gallery text dwells on the city’s ordinary textures — the shifting tones of limestone, warm rooftops, light moving over streets, hills and valleys. It connects Jerusalem to the idea of an earthly paradise, but relocates that paradise from competing religious claims to the lived present. The city’s holiness, the text suggests, may lie in its daily life, and its beauty belongs to its inhabitants rather than to any single people or faith.

Zawyeh has not published a list of works, materials or sizes, so details of the installation — how many images, in what format — are best confirmed with the gallery before visiting.

Zawyeh and Alserkal Art Week

Zawyeh Gallery operates spaces in both Ramallah and Dubai, a dual base that links the Palestinian art scene directly to the Gulf’s collector networks. Its Dubai space sits in Warehouse 27 of Alserkal Avenue, the converted industrial district in Al Quoz that hosts most of the city’s leading galleries. Opening in the same week as Alserkal Art Week, the exhibition will be seen alongside a dense programme across the Avenue — but its subject makes it one of the more pointed statements of the season.

Why it matters for collectors and image-makers

For collectors, the show offers work by a figure whose influence on art in the Arab world is already institutional: Persekian helped shape the Sharjah Biennial into a major international event. Acquiring from the artistic side of that career is a way of holding a piece of the region’s recent cultural history.

For photographers and painters working with place, “Take II” is a case study in returning to a subject. Repetition here is not redundancy but method: each revisit reveals what has changed, what has been erased and what was never shown in the first place. The question it leaves — who decides what a city looks like? — applies far beyond Jerusalem.

Visiting information

Zawyeh Gallery, Unit 27 (WH 27), Alserkal Avenue, Al Quoz, Dubai. 14 November 2026 – 10 January 2027. Hours: 10:00–18:00 (weekly closing days: check with the gallery). Tel. +971 4 5474 118, [email protected]. Opening reception: check with the gallery. See the gallery’s exhibition page, our Jack Persekian Dubai listing, and more openings on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.