Mojo Gallery

Exhibo editorial

Before Alserkal Avenue was a destination, it was four galleries and a lot of empty warehouse. Mojo was one of them. To understand why it matters, you have to picture Al Quoz when even taxi drivers hesitated to drive there — labour camps, storage units, mechanics, sand — and a handful of people betting that contemporary art could take root in it. Mojo was part of that original wager, and the scene that grew up around it became the most significant concentration of gallery programming in the region. What sets Mojo apart from its founding peers is what it became. It was built as a multifunctional space rather than a conventional white cube — a place where art, design and new media share the room, where workshops run alongside shows, and where a fashion and social enterprise, BLSSD, lives under the same roof. That refusal to stay inside the lines of a standard commercial gallery gives Mojo a different texture from the blue-chip programmes around it: less about the single defining artist, more about the gallery as a platform and a community. For a district that has since become polished and internationally known, Mojo is a reminder of the experimental, do-it-yourself spirit the Avenue was founded on.