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Since its founding in 2008, Alserkal Avenue, based in the industrial heart of Al Quoz, Dubai, has grown into one of the region’s foremost creative enclaves. What began as a cluster of converted warehouses now spans over half a million square feet, housing more than seventy art galleries, design studios, performance venues, and community spaces. With landmarks like Concrete by OMA, the avenue has become a powerhouse of cultural production and artistic experiment, a space where boundaries between disciplines are meant to be crossed.
This August, the space has decided to shed its physical walls entirely and reimagine itself as a virtual stage, transforming its Instagram feed into a curated, day-by-day performance space. Featuring artists like Zahra Al-Mahdi, Joel Sakkari (better known as Sakré), Spencer Chang, and The Camelia Committee, who closes the month from August 22 to 27. It’s a lineup that keeps the feed in constant motion, with each artist turning the screen into a site of experience.
The second act, Sakré’s series, feels like stepping into a living, breathing memory of Bengaluru. Joel Sakkari, a producer from Dharwad now based in the city, works under his moniker Sakré, meaning 'sugar' in Kannada, crafting beats that pulse with nostalgia while folding in the sounds of South Indian cinema, particularly the timeless work of Ilaiyaraja. His style moves easily between lo-fi, boom bap, and ambient textures, creating a soundscape that feels both rooted and futuristic. Known for his two-part beat tape 'Raja Has No Friends', he has a knack for turning what might otherwise be a fleeting sonic detail into the very heart and soul of a track.
For his Alserkal residency, Sakré visits some of his favourite Bangalore haunts, performing quicksets in places that carry their own cultural and historical weight, and capturing them on video with Kiran Kallur. At the Indian Coffee House on MG Road, a democratic café beloved for its filter coffee and standing counters, he layers beats over a classic Ilaiyaraja flip, channeling the hum of conversation and the ritual of caffeine into music.
Beneath a 400-year-old banyan tree in JP Nagar — one of the city’s oldest living witnesses, he samples Upendra’s 'A', weaving spiritual and communal histories into his loops. And inside the Shortwave Radio Museum in Basaveshwarnagar, curated by Uday Kalburgi, he riffs on cryptic transmissions like 'The Buzzer' at 4625 kHz, blending mysterious signals with experimental textures to evoke a sense of coded communication across time and space.
Each day’s recording appears as a short installation on the avenue’s feed, turning social media into both exhibition hall and amplifier. What makes this digital exhibition so distinctive is the way it uses real, deeply evocative sites as instruments of storytelling, grounding each performance in the cultural memory of Bengaluru while inviting a global audience to experience it in real time.
Using music as a tool, the series tethers us to grounds and histories; to coffee rituals and banyan-spun myths; to crackling shortwave signals and cinematic echoes. And in Sakré’s audio-visual postcards from Bengaluru, we find an intimate conversation between place, memory, and the possibilities of the digital frame.
