The UAE's art season has kicked off in full force.
Between solo exhibitions that blend autobiography with collective memory and group exhibitions that show the history and possibilities of Palestinian embroidery, there is a lot to see this week.
Here are 12 exhibitions taking place across the country.
1. Instruments of Viewing and Obscurity at Green Art Gallery
Iranian artist Nazgol Ansarinia’s installation at Green Art Gallery explores mass housing architecture in Tehran, especially the use of concrete and windows. She examines how these buildings relate to issues such as social control and privacy.
The installation is designed like a maze or scaled-down city, with watchtower-like forms and translucent surfaces shaped from window frames. Large video projections show facades of buildings transitioning from daylight to night. One scene captures a woman standing at her window, reversing the viewer’s gaze and challenging public-private boundaries.
Her work critiques modernist architecture’s legacy in the Global South, especially its environmental and social impacts. The installation invites reflection on how cities are built and how those structures affect people’s lives and sense of space.
Until October 28; Monday to Saturday, 11am-7pm; Dubai
2. Inside Out ’25 at Ayyam Gallery
Syrian painter Elias Izoli returns from a long hiatus with Inside Out ’25, a solo exhibition in which he uses the imagery of the circus to reflect on daily struggles.
Izoli’s bold brushwork and palette heavily contrasts with the drama and tension of the subjects he portrays. His acrobats, clowns and illusionists are depicted with grave, sometimes harrowing expressions. They seem less playful than they are burdened, even when they are mid-feat.
A tightrope walker, for instance, is haunted by a faraway stare. A trapeze artist closes her eyes as she leaps, communicating a look of quiet resignation. Applying make-up, a clown ogles back at the viewer, or a mirror, with chilling intensity, in a twist on the trope of the sad clown.
Izoli’s troupe are symbols, embodying the fragile resilience of ordinary life, even if they are depicted with extraordinary flair and make-up.
Until November 7; Monday to Friday, 10am-6pm; Saturday, noon-6pm; Dubai
3. The Only Way Out is Through: The Twentieth Line at The Third Line
Curated by Shumon Basar, The Only Way Out is Through marks the 20th anniversary of The Third Line, the contemporary art gallery in Alserkal Avenue.
In reflecting upon the gallery’s last two decades, bringing together works by every artist The Third Line has worked with, the exhibition inevitably contemplates upon the growth of Dubai as well, and in doing so, touches upon key global moments.
A timeline runs along the exhibition floor, with references that flit between hyperlocal and international events. These range from the launch of Art Dubai as well as the opening of Burj Khalifa to regional markers like the 2014 Gaza War, the 2020 Beirut Port Explosion and the launch of Saudi Arabia’s The Line, to global episodes like the outbreak of Covid-19 and the release of ChatGPT.
Between these timestamps and artworks by the likes of Farah Al Qasimi, Hayv Kahraman, the duo Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Tarek Al-Ghoussein and Yasiin Bey, The Only Way Out is Through becomes an exhibition that is as meditative and nostalgic as it is sobering.
Until November 7; Monday to Sunday, 11am-7pm; Dubai
4. Whispers of the Past at Sotheby’s Dubai
Organised by Aisha Alabbar Gallery and Sotheby’s Dubai, this exhibition is a significant collaboration between a local contemporary art gallery and an international platform.
Whispers of the Past showcases works by Najat Makki, Khalid Al Banna, Sara Al Haddad, Sara Aref Ahli and Samar Hejazi. This multigenerational group brings together paintings, sculptures, textiles, and glassworks that touch upon themes of memory and identity, while exploring how personal and collective histories are translated in materials and forms.
The exhibition is part of Sotheby’s Gallery Collective, a two-year partnership with UAE galleries launched in 2024. An artist talk, Brushes Between Us: Art and Legacy, moderated by Munira Al Sayegh, will open the programme on Thursday.
Until November 14; Sunday to Thursday, 9am-5pm; Dubai
5. Arranging Flowers at Taymour Grahne Projects
Arranging Flowers, a solo exhibition by US artist Gail Spaien, marks the opening of Taymour Grahne Projects’ new space at Alserkal Avenue.
Spaien’s paintings are a lyrical exploration of domestic scenes. Tables, flower pots and windows with idyllic scenes are delightfully flattened, giving a disorienting feel to everyday objects.
Her works are influenced by ikebana, the Japanese art of floral arrangement. There are flowers even in works where the interior is only barely visible, such as Waypoints, which centres on a sprawling seascape and shows the edges of a stone balcony, decorated with blossoming potted trees. It is a subtle contrast between curated, domestic environments and the grandeur of the natural world, made cohesive through Spaien’s idiosyncratic flatness.
Until November 20; Monday to Saturday, 11am-7pm; Dubai
6. Silent Residues at Iris Projects
An artist known for blurring the lines between performance and photography, Ammar Al Attar is presenting a body of recent work that ponders upon the cyclical nature of our daily rituals.
The Emirati artist ventures towards peripheral sites across the country, engaging with the remnants of human presence and industrial debris, coaxing from them stories and meaning.
His monochrome photographs are superimposed with painted circles, emanating from the works with phosphoric vibrancy while tackling themes that range from the caprice of censorship to daily absurdities and the human capacity for adapting in a world that is quickly changing.
Until November 26, Monday to Friday, 11am-7pm; Abu Dhabi
7. The Imaginary Museum at Rizq Art Initiative
The Imaginary Museum is a group show featuring 27 artists from the UAE and abroad.
It draws its title from French writer Andre Malraux’s idea of a museum without walls, reframing artworks as fragments of memory rather than fixed objects.
Curated by Meena Vari, the exhibition brings together generations of Emirati artists, from pioneer Hassan Sharif to Afra Al Dhaheri and her sculptural braids of rope, as well as Maktoum Marwan Al Maktoum, who reimagines the remains of gazelles as relics of time.
Other highlights include Indu Antony’s olfactory artwork that distils the scent of rain, Abdulrahim Al Kendi’s translation of the Quran into a sequence of 0s and 1s in keeping with the binary code, as well as Christopher Joshua Benton’s reflections on the kandura.
Until November 30; Monday to Saturday, 10am-6pm; Abu Dhabi
8. Restless Circle at Sharjah Art Foundation
The centrepiece of Restless Circle, and the artwork that lends the exhibition its title, is an installation inspired by the desert plants that draw circular patterns in the sand as they swerve with the wind.
For Afra Al Dhaheri, this ceaseless, spiralling movement, with no specific destination or purpose, offers a sharp metaphor to the fatigue inflicted by the constant expectation to produce and perform.
It is a concern that pervades across several works in Restless Circle. Al Dhaheri specifically tackles the idea of repetition, highlighting its tension in relation to time. She uses a diversity of materials to explore these concepts, including rope, fabric, cement and even hair, arranging them in loops, strands and bends, forms that allude to the motions of time.
The body of work is thought-provoking – at once challenging capitalistic and artistic expectations of ceaseless production, while also showing how new forms of knowledge emerge from the cyclical processes of making and unmaking.
Until December 14; Saturday to Thursday, 9am-9pm; Friday, 4pm-9pm; Sharjah
9. Seas are sweet, fish tears are salty at Jameel Arts Centre
Art Jameel presents the first institutional solo exhibition of Saudi artist Mohammad Alfaraj. Rooted in his hometown of Al Ahsa, the works draw from agricultural landscapes, oral traditions and the details of everyday life.
The show spans photography, film, installation and poetry, unfolding across both the indoor galleries and garden spaces of Jameel Arts Centre. Hands, birds and palm trees recur throughout, forming a loose constellation of motifs. New commissions include a sound piece, a site-specific structure and a video work. The exhibition reflects Alfaraj’s interest in storytelling, moving across human and non-human worlds.
Until January 4; Saturday to Thursday, 10am-8pm; Fridays, noon-8pm; Dubai
10. Sila: All That is Left to You at Maraya Art Centre
Sila: All That is Left to You is an exhibition dedicated to tatreez, the centuries-old Palestinian art of embroidery.
Curated by Cima Azzam of Maraya Art Centre and Noor Suhail, curator of 1971 – Design Space, the exhibition brings together works from across a range of mediums, from video and installation to textiles and paintings.
Many of the works in Sila were crafted in collaboration with embroiderers from the Inaash Association, a non-profit that supports more than 2,000 women in Palestinian refugee camps across Lebanon.
Collectively, the works in the exhibition expand on the possibilities and definition of tatreez. They show the technical aspects of the technique, with its care for precision, while also touching upon its historical and societal layers.
The works also highlight how tatreez has become a mode of resistance over the decades, subsisting against the erasure of Palestinian culture, particularly as Israel ramps up its attack on Gaza.
Until January 5; Saturday to Thursday, 10am-7pm; Friday, 4pm-7pm; Sharjah
11. Past of a Temporal Universe at NYUAD Art Gallery
The individual components in Ala Younis’s works are small – tin soldiers, dioramas and archival materials – but the way they come together, as a constellation of stories touching upon mythmaking, urban planning and societal perception, is monumental.
The Kuwaiti-born Jordanian artist draws from her background as an architect to build sprawling bodies of work that reference landmark modernist structures as a departure point.
From the Le Corbusier-designed Baghdad Gymnasium or Egypt’s High Dam, Younis begins drawing an archival trail, citing films, music, video footage and literature, while inviting viewers to explore these personable stories.
Past of a Temporal Universe brings more than two decades' worth of work in one space, in an elegantly curated exhibition that offers a lot of food for thought, whether you are familiar with Younis’s works or are experiencing them for the first time.
Until January 18; Tuesday to Sunday, noon-8pm; Abu Dhabi
12. Self-portrait with a cat I don’t have at Jameel Arts Centre
In his debut institutional solo exhibition in the UAE, Bady Dalloul presents an autobiography that touches upon collective memory.
The French-Syrian artist uses books, board games, matchboxes and magazines to create layered works, narrative epics that challenge Eurocentric perspectives and definitions of art.
A highlight of the show, and one made specifically for the exhibition, is Age of Empires. The series of 50 works on paper draws from a 19th-century Japanese astrology manual to reflect upon the rise and demise of imperial power. The exhibition also features a recreation of Dalloul’s home studio in Dubai, featuring works that shed light on his itinerant life and practice that have led to travels across France, Japan and the UAE.
Until February 22, Saturday to Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, 10am-8pm; Friday, noon-8pm; Dubai
