Provisional Sanctuaries at Tashkeel, Dubai: Painting the City’s Makeshift Prayer Rooms

Anyone who has spent time in Dubai knows them, even if they have never looked closely: a curtained corner at the back of a warehouse, a carpeted strip behind a shopfront, a small room on a construction site with shoes lined up at the door. These temporary musollas — informal prayer spaces — are the subject of Provisional Sanctuaries at Tashkeel, Dubai, a solo exhibition by Malaysian artist and designer Shamin Sahrum running from 24 October to 26 November 2026.

Provisional Sanctuaries: architecture without architects

Architecture usually tells the story of the sacred through grand buildings: domes, minarets, monumental entrances. Provisional Sanctuaries starts from the opposite end. Tashkeel’s exhibition text describes spaces that appear quietly across the UAE’s cities — in warehouses, shopfronts and back rooms — and asks how such modest, improvised places manage to produce belonging and stillness. Its proposition is that a space becomes sacred through practice, memory and the presence of people, not through architecture alone.

It is an idea with a long pedigree in architectural thinking — the study of vernacular and informal building — but it is rarely approached through painting. That is what makes this show unusual.

An architect who turned to painting

According to his artist profile at Tashkeel, Muhummad Shamin Sahrum (the exhibition page credits him as Shamin Sharum) trained as an architect, earning a master’s degree in architecture from the University of Greenwich in the UK. He co-founded the design studio No-To-Scale and spent around a decade working as an architect and designer before moving into strategic design consultancy. His art practice began in 2018 and focuses on the social psyche, collective memory and the material remains of the city. In Malaysia, he was a finalist in the Young Contemporaries competition at the National Art Gallery in 2019 and again in 2022, when he received a Jury Mention Award.

That background explains the exhibition’s format. Alongside paintings and drawings, Sahrum shows maquettes — the scale models architects use to think through a space before it exists. Here, the logic is reversed: the models study spaces that already exist but were never formally designed.

A personal starting point

The project grew from the artist’s own arrival in the Emirates. In his statement he writes that “relocating to Dubai made me feel like an outsider.” Finding a small musolla at a temporary site, he explains, eased that sense of displacement. It is a familiar experience in a city where most residents were born elsewhere: the places that make a newcomer feel at home are often not landmarks but small, shared rooms used by people with similar routines.

How the work is made

Rather than documenting whole rooms, Tashkeel explains, Sahrum isolates fragments of these makeshift spaces and reconstructs them. Moving between painting, drawing and three-dimensional models lets the same space be considered as image, as plan and as object. The approach recalls the way architectural drawings abstract a building into lines and planes — but applied to rooms whose only “architects” are the people who set them up and use them.

Tashkeel’s role in Dubai’s art scene

Tashkeel is a Dubai organisation that supports artists and designers through studios, residencies, workshops and exhibitions, with a base in Nad Al Sheba and a makerspace in Alserkal Avenue. Its programme is especially valuable for practitioners based in the UAE who work between art and design — exactly the territory Sahrum occupies. Provisional Sanctuaries fits that mission: a resident of the city looking hard at the city’s overlooked spaces.

Why it matters

• For painters: a reminder that interiors and everyday spaces remain rich subjects, especially when approached with an architect’s eye for structure.
• For collectors: an early-career artist with a clear research focus and recognition from Malaysia’s national gallery competition — the kind of profile worth following.
• For Dubai residents: an invitation to notice the quiet places that make a fast-growing city feel shared.

Visiting information

Tashkeel, Dubai. 24 October – 26 November 2026; opening reception Friday 23 October, 6pm. The Culturist’s autumn guide places the exhibition at Tashkeel Nad Al Sheba (Intersection 5 & 20, Nad Al Sheba 1); please confirm the venue and hours with Tashkeel (+971 4 336 3313, [email protected]). See the official exhibition page, our Provisional Sanctuaries listing, and more shows in Dubai and beyond on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.