Afrah Shafiq turns Soviet children's books into a game at Jameel Arts Centre

Jameel Arts Centre in Al Jaddaf will open a new show on 12 November that visitors do not just look at but play. Afrah Shafiq: Nobody Knows For Certain fills Gallery 10 with a multimedia picture game that sits somewhere between interactive fiction, a documentary and an old point-and-click adventure, and it stays on until 25 April 2027.

The subject is a slice of history that many families in South Asia will recognise. From the 1960s until the middle of the 1980s, illustrated children's books from the Soviet Union were translated into Indian languages and sold cheaply across India, and for a generation they were part of growing up. Shafiq, born in 1989 and based in Goa, uses those books as her starting point. Players gather books inside the game, step through portals from one tale to the next, and come across archive material and historical backdrops along the way.

The look of the work draws on much older Russian visual traditions as well: Lubok chapbooks, lacquer miniatures, folk embroidery and Volga lace, alongside art movements such as socialist realism, constructivism and geometric abstraction. Shafiq built it during a field research fellowship with the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, working with an archive of Soviet children's books and with oral testimonies from people who remember them. She wrote, animated and drew the game herself, with Kushal Neil as programmer, Piyush Verma as lead animator and an original score by Rushad Mistry and Zohran Miranda. The exhibition is curated by Iaroslav Volovod and Valentin Diaconov.

It is one of several new shows arriving at the centre this season. Salah Elmur's exhibition opens on 31 October, an Artist's Room by Bani Abidi follows in Gallery 9 on 13 November, the day after Shafiq's opening, and the centre's Down to Earth weekend returns on 14 and 15 November. Shafiq's work tends to begin in archives, both official and informal, and to mix animation, text, code, sound and handmade elements into spaces that people can move through.

Jameel Arts Centre is on the Jaddaf Waterfront, beside the Dubai Creek, and describes itself as open to all and free. It opens from 10am to 8pm every day except Tuesday, when it is closed, and from midday on Fridays. No booking is needed for the galleries. Because the work is a game, allow time to play rather than walk past: it is built to be explored at your own pace, and it suits older children as well as adults who grew up with those books.