Dubai Walls is a street-art initiative launched by developer Meraas, whose inaugural project in March 2016 turned the City Walk district into an open-air gallery. Sixteen internationally renowned street artists representing five continents were invited to create signature works across City Walk's walls and public spaces, in a bid to bring high-calibre urban art to the region.
The roster reads as a who's-who of contemporary street art: Blek le Rat, the French 'godfather of stencil art', who brought his trademark stencilled rats and a tug-of-war scene; British pop-surrealist D*Face; Portuguese artist Vhils, who carved a portrait of a Bedouin into a wall with hammer drills and chisels, inspired by a 1950s photograph from Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian Sands; Belgian animal-muralist ROA; Australian Rone, with a haunting female portrait replicated from a wall in Havana; British stencil artist Nick Walker with his bowler-hatted 'Vandal' painting 'I love DXB'; and the Polish duo Etam Cru, whose six-storey fine-art portrait was billed as the largest mural in the Middle East at the time. The line-up also included Ben Eine, Icy & Sot, Magda Sayeg (of the global yarn-bombing movement), Aiko, Ron English, Eelus, Slinkachu and The London Police.
The works range from full-building installations down to Slinkachu's tiny street-level model scenes, mixing stencils, spray paint, carving and knitted yarn. Many of the murals remain in good condition, and the project was explicitly aligned with Dubai's ambition to become an open-air museum and a global art capital.
Exhibo editorial
For a district built around premium shopping, City Walk pulled off something unlikely in 2016: it convinced sixteen of the world's best street artists to treat its walls as canvases. The result is a genuine greatest-hits — Blek le Rat's rats, a Vhils portrait gouged straight out of the concrete, an Etam Cru face six storeys tall — dropped into a place you'd otherwise visit for the cafés.
The pleasure is in the range. You go from a full-building mural to one of Slinkachu's tiny model figures you'll miss entirely unless you're looking down, from spray paint to Magda Sayeg's knitted yarn wrapped round a fire hydrant. Street art usually thrives on the unsanctioned; here it's fully invited in, and the surprise is how well the best pieces survive the polish. Bring good shoes and look up, then down.
How to find it
The Dubai Walls murals are spread throughout the City Walk district along Al Safa Street. Explore on foot — the works range from full-wall and multi-storey murals to tiny model installations tucked at street level, so wandering the pedestrian lanes is the way to find them. Look both up (for the large murals and the six-storey Etam Cru portrait) and down (for Slinkachu's miniatures).
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