Weekly UAE museum and gallery guide: Young Emirati photographer gets first solo show

This week’s exhibitions chart new geographies, both literally and metaphorically. From remote mountains and rural farmlands to imagined terrains, the featured shows reflect shifting grounds, whether beneath our feet or within our collective consciousness.

Here are three exhibitions to see this week.

Everyman's Mountain, by Omar Al Gurg at Lawrie Shabibi

Emirati photographer and designer Omar Al Gurg is presenting his first solo show with Everyman’s Mountain. The exhibition at Lawrie Shabibi features 24 archival prints from a six-day trek up Kilimanjaro in 2021. From misty forests and regenerating moorlands to the fragile icy summit, Al Gurg’s work shows the mountain as a shifting ecosystem, shaped by nature and human activity.

The exhibition is as much a personal odyssey as it is a broader environmental mediation, a tribute to nature’s quiet transformations and our collective duty to preserve them.

Monday to Saturday, 10am-6pm; until September 12; Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai

The Peasant, the Scholar and the Engineer, by Asuncion Molinos Gordo at Jameel Arts Centre

Spanish artist-researcher Asuncion Molinos Gordo’s first major retrospective in West Asia surveys 15 years of her work on rural knowledge, land use and food systems.

Gordo's work draws on anthropology and cultural studies. It reframes farmers as not only food producers, but also intellectuals and engineers. Their vernacular practices, she points out, may hold keys to sustainability.

Works that are being featured in the exhibition include her famous World Agriculture Museum, which was first staged in Cairo in 2010 and won the Sharjah Biennial Prize in 2015. Another highlight is Como Soliamos, a 2020 rammed-earth installation echoing Andalusian and falaj irrigation techniques.

Saturday to Monday, Wednesday to Thursday, 10am-8pm; Friday; noon-8pm; until September 28; Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai

Unstable Grounds, at 421 Arts Campus

In Unstable Grounds, the MFA graduate exhibition from NYU Abu Dhabi at 421, art becomes an act of placemaking – a wrestling with materials in search of meaning. The show is layered and searching, a constellation of practices that reveal not just what is shown, but also what resists visibility.

The exhibition features the work of eight artists, exploring themes of the environment, displacement, memory and human connection, through installation, performance, video, sculpture and print.

Tuesday to Sunday, 10am-8pm; until September 7; 421 Arts Campus, Abu Dhabi