Exhibitions to Visit in Dubai - Autumn 2025
Whilst we don’t have an actual autumn season, just slightly less hot temperatures, it is a new season of exhibitions in Dubai.
Below are the ones I am looking forward to visit, I’ve included a few that opened in the summer that end in September/October that are worth checking out.
If more exhibitions that interest me are announced, I’ll add them here, so do check back.
Images and extracted text are from the exhibition websites/Instagram accounts.
Update (November 5): I’ve moved up the ongoing exhibitions, some have been extended and I also added newly announced exhibitions. All the closed exhibitions can be seen after the ongoing exhibition list.
Ongoing exhibitions:
The Only Way Out Is Through: The Twentieth Line
The Third Line, Alserkal Avenue
September 18 - November 7 December 28
The Only Way Out Is Through looks back on two decades of The Third Line’s story in relation to global cultural, political, and economic shifts through a retrospective exhibition, program of conversations, and “Flash Sales Specials”—a series of 48-hour pop-up sales of thematically grouped, long-unseen works from the gallery’s archive.
The exhibition component features every artist currently represented by The Third Line, with early and recent works drawn from the gallery’s extensive two-decade archive.
Selected pieces are arranged into four chronological sections - 2005 to 2009, 2010 to 2015, 2016 to 2020, 2021 to 2025, each contextualized by a timeline running across the gallery’s floors that delineates key political, economic, and cultural moments, ranging from the global financial crisis, through uprisings across the Arab world and the COVID-19 pandemic, to the present moment shaped by intersecting global crises.
Curated by Shumon Basar.
Artists: Abbas Akhavan, Ala Ebtekar, Amir H. Fallah, Anuar Khalifi, Arwa Abouon, Bady Dalloul, Farah Al Qasimi, Farhad Moshiri, Fouad Elkoury, Hassan Hajjaj, Hayv Kahraman, Huda Lutfi, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Jordan Nassar, Kamran Samimi, Laleh Khorramian, Lamya Gargash, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Nima Nabavi, Pouran Jinchi, Rana Begum, Sahand Hesamiyan, Sara Naim, Sarah Awad, Shirin Aliabadi, Slavs and Tatars, Sophia Al-Maria, Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Vian Sora, yasiin bey, Youssef Nabil
Motherhood
Kutubna Cultural Center
September 20 – November 16 January 12, 2026
Mohammed Buhasan, A Mother’s Shadow Never Fades
This exhibition brings together artists and photographers from around the world, each offering a personal and deeply felt interpretation of motherhood.
It includes 20 paintings and 33 photographic works, featuring 29 artists and photographers from 17 countries: Albania, Bahrain, Belarus, the United Kingdom, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, France, India, Jordan, Lebanon, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestine, Poland, Russia, Tanzania, and Ukraine.
Curated by Nora Qudah.
Artists: Alia Bent Sultan, Aman Ali, Anxhela El Ahmadieh, Anna Grosheva, Donia Hassan Othman, Ibrahim Nagi, John Parkes Railton, Karin Stumpf, Klaithem Aljabri, Komaldeep Makkar, Latifa Ahmad Almazrouei, Latifa Ahli, Maha Abdelmaged, Malak Yasser Dalloul, Mohammed Buhasan, Mona Biswarupa Mohanty, Nasta Martyn, Natallia Nagorniak, Nisreen Mounib Shawwa, Onuoha Columbus, Paresh Thukrul, Renata Athanasio, Rima Wehbi, Shrutika Gosavi, Tanya Yatsenko, Tumpa Banerjee, Wafa Khazendar, and Zaheda Muntazir.
https://www.kutubna.ae/pages/motherhood-an-art-and-photography-exhibition
Bady Dalloul: Self-portrait with a cat I don’t have
Jameel Arts Centre
September 20 - February 22, 2026
Bady Dalloul repurposes everyday materials—including books, matchboxes, board games and magazines—to create surprising dialogues across cultures and genres. He elevates everyday narratives into epics, bridges high and low brow, and importantly, connects non-Western cultures, at times unexpectedly, outside of conventional delineations and Eurocentric gaze.
Blending autobiographical anecdotes with stories of individuals he encounters, the artworks feature fragile heroes and ordinary people navigating systems larger than themselves.
Curated by Lucas Morin.
https://jameelartscentre.org/whats-on/bady-dalloul-self-portrait-with-a-cat-i-dont-have/
The Shape of Things to Come
Efie Gallery, Alserkal Avenue
October 11 - 10 January 2026
The Shape of Things to Come is a forward-looking exhibition that brings together a diverse group of internationally acclaimed artists whose practices illuminate the complexities of a rapidly changing world.
Through bold palettes, inventive textures, and unconventional materials, these artists stretch the limits of painting, sculpture, and photography, demonstrating the resilience and adaptability of art to mirror and intervene in contemporary life. Curated by Dexter Wimberly.
Artists:
Abdoulaye Konaté, Adam Pendleton, Carrie Mae Weem, El Anatsui, Iman Issa, Yinka Shonibare
https://efiegallery.com/articles/the-shape-of-things-to-come
Dubai: Light, Lens, Legacy - Celebrating a Century of Leica
FN Designs, Alserkal Avenue
October 15 - January 8, 2026
Experience Dubai’s transformation through the lens of five Leica photographers - from the 1940s to today.
A visual journey of 50 photographs celebrating Leica’s 100-year legacy - featuring works by Sir Wilfred Thesiger, Fatma AlMosa, Hisham Khonji, Joseph Hutson & Saeed Nassouri.
Prix Pictet “Storm”
Ishara Art Foundation, Alserkal Avenue
October 17 - December 13
Balazs Gardi, The Storm, 1.46pm, January 6, 2021, Washington, DC, 2021
Storm is both a natural phenomenon and a metaphor for the unseen and relentless forces shaping our world today. As a theme, it speaks to the growing volatility of our age, encompassing environmental collapse, political upheaval, economic instability, and social unrest, where we seem forever poised on the brink of the next crisis.
The exhibition will showcase works by 12 photographers shortlisted for the 11th cycle of the award.
Artists:
Alfredo Jaar, Baudouin Mouanda, Balazs Gardi, Belal Khaled, Camille Seaman, Hannah Modigh, Laetitia Vançon, Marina Caneve, Patrizia Zelano, Roberto Huarcaya, Takashi Arai, Tom Fecht
https://www.ishara.org/exhibition/prix-pictet-storm/
https://prix.pictet.com/exhibitions-and-events/storm-ishara-art-foundation-dubai
Printed Matter
Fann À Porter
November 1 - January 10, 2026
Cynthia Zahar, Shuhud, 2024
A group exhibition showcasing photography and mixed media. Through preserving and reconfiguring found materials, stories, and images, each artist tackles themes of memory, war, and change.
Artists:
El3attar Film Collective, Cynthia Zahar, Georges Yammine, Mohammad Al Hawajri
https://www.fannaporter.com/exhibitions/92-printed-matter-el3attar-film-collective-cynthia-zahar-georges-yammine-and/works/
Poetry of Birds
L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts, Dubai Design District
November 6 - April 25, 2026
Piel Frères, Belt buckle depicting a peacock feather, c. 1900, Cloisonné enamel on brass and glass
"Poetry of Birds" explores the timeless symbolism of birds in arts, poetry, and jewelry, focusing on the dialogue between 19th and 20th century Western jewelry and Islamic arts, with poetry as the common thread.
The exhibition is inspired by Farid al-din Attar's Conference of the Birds and is conceived as a poetic experience, beginning with a poem by Mahmoud Darwish, followed by a bejeweled display of bird species and culminating in contemplation of an aviary of imaginary birds by French jeweler Pierre Sterlé (1905-1978).
Exceptional jewels, precious objects, and gouaché drawings depicting birds from jewelers such as Van Cleef & Arpels, Cartier, and Boucheron, are showcased alongside Middle Eastern works of art from the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization and Dubai Museums. Contemporary photography from Emirati photographer Faisal Al Rais is also displayed.
https://www.lecolevancleefarpels.com/me/en/exhibition/exhibition-poetry-of-birds
Tor Seidel: Riposte
XVA Gallery
November 15 - December 11
Since the 1990s, environmental activists have repeatedly damaged works of art in museums in order to draw attention to climate change with nonsensical arguments and accuse stunned museum visitors of inaction. The exhibition and an accompanying research project examine whether these attacks can also be considered performative acts of art.
In his work, Tor Seidel focuses on the protagonists’ actionism, the shock or entertainment value for visitors, and the professional dissemination of videos of the attack groups on the internet. This leads him to conclude that these are not only ambivalent forms of protest, but also independent artistic acts.
Tor Seidel reconstructs some of these attacks in three phases: a reenactment of the scene following the attack, collecting statements from those involved, and transforming the defacement into a new piece: the alteration has been manifested.
Aliyah Alawadhi: Girl Parts
Bayt Al Mamzar
November 15 - January 4, 2026
Aliyah Alawadhi, Demons in My Hair, 2025
Childhood is a half-remembered taste: sweet, sticky, and sometimes spoiled. In Girl Parts, Aliyah Alawadhi metabolizes this residue into a language of paint - bodies shimmering in pinks and creams, mouths agape, devouring and dreaming.
At first glance, her canvases glisten with playfulness: pastel hues, visceral textures, and theatrical bodies caught mid-gesture. But beneath their apparent sweetness lies a reflection on how women learn to inhabit their bodies.
Her figures eat, laugh, and comfort one another; they take flight and conjure spells, occupying space, indulging in excess, and refusing composure. Their grotesqueness is a form of release - a way of existing beyond the narrow gaze that defines the “girl body.”
Curated by Oceane Sailly.
https://hunna.art/exhibitions/31-girl-parts-by-aliyah-alawadhi/overview/
https://www.instagram.com/baytalmamzar
The importance of staying quiet
2. Lala Rukh II
Grey Noise, Alserkal Avenue
November 16 - January 17, 2026
Lala Rukh, Beruwela a, b, c, 1996/2025 (detail)
The importance of staying quiet is a year-long dialogic exchange between Saira Ansari and Umer Butt. Through research, readings, and exhibition-making, the programme aims to present a distinct perspective on abstraction from Pakistan.
The second presentation as part of The importance of staying quiet is titled:
2. Lala Rukh II
The second exhibition of The importance of staying quiet completes the two-part observational inquiry into Lala Rukh’s photographic practice.
Lala Rukh I presented a selection of photographs from the artist’s archives during her years at the University of Chicago (1974-76). Its speculative framework helped us to stage the evolution of Lala’s photographic sensibility, as she refined her sense of composition, framing, and perception.
For Lala Rukh II, we wanted to see how this inquiry could be extended to works from the late-1970s onward, showing how her practice moved toward abstraction.
Kamrooz Aram: Domestic Compositions
Green Art Gallery, Alserkal Avenue
November 16 - January 10, 2026
Kamrooz Aram, Untitled (Paravent), 2024
Kamrooz Aram’s holistic approach to artmaking integrates sculpture, painting, and architecture, creating a context for viewing cultural artifacts anew that brings them back into the circulation of our vibrating, living present.
A Cage Went in Search of a Bird
1x1 Gallery, Alserkal Avenue
November 16 - [end date unlisted]
Dilip Chobisa, Who owns it? - 4, 2024
In A Cage Went in Search of a Bird, architecture becomes a seeker—a body in search of breath, a form in search of presence. The exhibition asks: what happens when structure outlives its purpose, when fragments become the only traces of what once held life? By situating architecture within this metaphorical and emotional terrain, the exhibition invites viewers to reconsider not just how we build, but how we inhabit—how the spaces we create continue to seek us, long after we’ve left them behind.
Artists: Chittrovanu Mazumdar, Dilip Chobisa, Gigi Scaria, Martand Khosla, M. Pravat, Nida Bangash, Pallavi Arora, Parul Sharma, Pooja Iranna, Praveen, Vibha Galhotra, Vivek Vilasini
https://www.1x1artgallery.com/home
https://alserkal.online/event/a-cage-went-in-search-of-a-bird-architecture-as-metaphor
Interwoven
House of Arts, Expo City Dubai
November 18 - December 2026
Khalid Mezaina, The Palm Tree of Life, 2019
Across the Gulf, weaving has long connected people and place. Interwoven gathers artists and designers who reimagine this heritage, where fibre becomes spirit, gesture becomes story, and tradition continues through making together.
Curated by Alia AlShamsi.
Artists:
Ahmed AlAjmi, AlZaina Lootah, Ghada Khunji, Khalid Mezaina, Mariam Al-Homaid, Munira AlShami, Nasir Nasrallah, Noura Alserkal, Sara Alkhayal, Sarah AlUlaqi
https://www.expocitydubai.com/en/things-to-do/attractions/house-of-arts/
Closed exhibitions:
Peripheral Acts: An Interruption by Shazia Salem
Studio 13, Bel Jafla Complex, Warehouse 13, Al Quoz
Until September 19
Peripheral Acts is a project that invites an artist's practice to reside in public space for a time. In the hope that this residency allows us to explore the relational dynamics of public space in the UAE - to look at the different layers of publics and being/s-in-public that the space affords us.
This is less about spectacle and more about presence: about noticing, lingering, and experimenting with what it means to practice in conversation with its surroundings.
This is part of an ongoing project with an open call, deadline to apply is October 1.
https://www.instagram.com/peripheral_acts
https://www.instagram.com/studiothirteen_dxb
time heals, just not quick enough…
Efie Gallery, Alserkal Avenue
Until September 27
time heals, just not quick enough… brings together contemporary works in film and photography to explore the slow, fragmented, and often nonlinear processes of healing, memory, and transformation.
The moving image, fluid and unfolding, captures time in motion; the still photograph, by contrast, arrests it in a single frame. These distinct modes of seeing offer complementary perspectives: one continuous, the other punctuated. Together, they echo the rhythms of memory, grief, resilience, and hope.
Curated by Ose Ekore.
Artists:
Samuel Fosso (b. 1962)
Aïda Muluneh (b. 1974)
Kelani Abass (b. 1979)
Abeer Sultan (b. 1999)
Sumaya Fallatah (b. 2000)
Alisa Gorshenina: Tender Ruin of My Body
1604 Art Space, Blue Bay Tower, Business Bay
September 18 - 28
“The hills carry on a person, a mistress body that is torn and vulnerable but who continues to live and thrive. What does it mean to be tender? What does it mean to be a body that feels, flows, grows, weeps and blossoms?
This exhibition is about fabrique poetry where every part is not an object but a feeling. Hills extend a body and sculptures turn into materialized emotions. A heart, a tear, a head, a flower become an intimate terrain. Everything is soft, vulnerable, alive. Sculptures are delicate and fragile as sprigs in spring. The earth becomes a place where pain takes roots. However, it could give birth to something beautiful...!” —Alisa Gorshenina
https://www.1604artspace.com/exhibitions-events/show-all/tender-ruin-of-my-body
Shifting Gazes: Women Through Middle Eastern Eyes
The Farjam Foundation, DIFC, Gate Avenue at DIFC
Until October 15
Jewad Selim, Nalini, 1949
Spanning over eight decades of artistic production, this curated selection from The Farjam Collection brings together 27 works by artists from the region, both men and women. From the historical echoes of Qajar-inspired photography to bold contemporary interventions in pop culture, sculpture, and digital media, these artworks collectively challenge reductive stereotypes and open up a dialogue about identity, memory, resilience, and resistance.
Rather than offering a single narrative, Shifting Gazes invites viewers to reflect on multiple perspectives and cultural constructions of womanhood. Who gets to define the female image in art? How do artists subvert or reinterpret these portrayals? And what new roles are women beginning to occupy—as subjects, storytellers, and visionaries?
Organized across four thematic sections—Identity and Visibility, Personal and Emotional Landscapes, Tradition, Modernity, and Cultural Memory, and Social Commentary and Critique—the exhibition positions the female figure as both a mirror of social transformation and a force of cultural agency.
Curated by Amir Arvand.
https://www.farjamcollection.com/2025/04/16/shifting-gazes-women-through-middle-eastern-eyes/
The Boys are Alright
Bayt AlMamzar
Until October 26
Mohammed Singel, Three Identities, One Canvas, Still me, 2012
The exhibition reflects on boyhood, adolescence, and the ways memory reshapes them over time. The artists, each an alum of Rashid School for Boys, navigate personal and collective archives, revisiting classrooms, corridors, and fields that shaped their early selves.
Through works that shift between image, object, and gesture, they trace the subtle transitions between past and present, innocence and self-awareness, mischief and responsibility.
The Boys are Alright returns to those years with more patience, more language, and the clarity to see them in a new light.
Curated by Jumairy.
Artists: Ahmed AlMulla, Ahmed AlSharhan, Gaith Abdulla, Hamid Al Najjar, Jumairy, Khalid Al Amimi, Maktoum Al Maktoum, Mohammed AlMaktoum, Mohammed Singel, Talal Al Najjar, Ziad Al Najjar
https://www.instagram.com/baytalmamzar
https://www.baytalmamzar.org
Rooted Echoes
NIKA Project Space, Al Khayat Avenue
September 10 - November 1
Zahra Jewanjee, Translucent Facade, 2025
Rooted Echoes brings together the works of exploring memory, identity, and belonging. The exhibition emerges from the artists’ participation in NIKA Project Space’s summer open studio residency.
At its core is a shared impulse to retrieve and reframe cultural inheritance. The works speak to familial and ecological lineage, reflecting how memory can be embodied and materialized across media, framing it as a living archive.
Across geographies and genealogies, these artists chart deeply personal cartographies of home. Their works suggest that belonging is not a fixed point, but a process in motion. Rooted Echoes layers past and present, memory and material, voice and silence.
Curated by Nadine Khoury.
Artists: Yasmine Al Award, Ahed Al Kathiri, Zahra Jewanjee
https://www.nika-projects.com/exhibitions/rooted-echoes
Marwan Bassiouni: New Western Views (Preview)
Lawrie Shabibi, Alserkal Avenue
September 18 - November 5
Marwan Bassiouni, New British Views #06, England, 2021
Featuring photographs taken between 2018 and 2022 from inside mosques across the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the UK, the exhibition offers a look at Bassiouni’s ongoing international project. These works reframe landscape photography through the lens of lived Muslim presence in the contemporary West.
Each image centres on a window—an aperture onto the outside world, rarely found in purpose-built mosques. Through these portals, we glimpse familiar Western landscapes: traffic junctions, supermarkets, apartment blocks, sports fields. But these views are not neutral. They are framed by interiors shaped by Islamic visual culture: patterned tiles, rugs, wooden minbars, and other architectural elements drawn from the diverse communities building mosques across the West.
Originating from places such as Bosnia, Lebanon, Turkey, Pakistan, India, Morocco, and Indonesia, these communities transform everyday suburban spaces into makeshift prayer rooms. The result is a distinctly Western scene viewed through a distinctly Islamic frame.
New Western Views pushes back against the long history of Orientalist image making, which has traditionally cast the Islamic world as distant, exotic, and other. Here, Bassiouni reverses that gaze. The landscape is no longer the backdrop for conquest, curiosity, or romanticisation, it is simply what exists outside the mosque window.
https://www.lawrieshabibi.com/exhibitions/192-marwan-bassiouni-new-western-views-preview/overview/
Caravan of Colors Through Time: A Retrospective of Mona Al Khaja
Aisha Alabbar Gallery, Alserkal Avenue
September 18 – November 5
A landmark retrospective celebrating over four decades of work by Mona Al Khaja (b. Sharjah, 1958), a pioneering figure of Emirati modern art.
This retrospective traces Mona Al Khaja’s remarkable journey, from her formative years studying at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo under mentors such as Dr. Najat Makki, to her continued exploration of abstraction, symbolism, and color. Featuring works from every stage of her career, the exhibition highlights her mastery of watercolor and acrylic landscapes, capturing the UAE’s deserts, architecture, and ephemeral light through a uniquely Emirati lens.
A first-generation Emirati artist, Mona’s practice bridges personal memory and collective history, establishing a distinct visual language within Arab modernism. Her work continues to inspire new generations, offering meditative reflections on time, place, and belonging.
https://www.aishaalabbar.art/exhibitions/35-caravan-of-colors-through-time-a-retrospective-on-mona-al-khaja/press_release_text/
The importance of staying quiet
1. Lala Rukh I
Grey Noise, Alserkal Avenue
September 18 – November 05
Lala Rukh, Untitled 10 (Chicago archives 1976 – 1978)
In 2014, The importance of staying quiet was exhibited in Hong Kong as an attempt to acknowledge a minimal vocabulary within Pakistani art. Conceived by Saira Ansari and Umer Butt, the presentation brought together works spanning six decades, between the 1950s and 2010s. The exhibition highlighted moments where they pared form and image down to their most distilled elements. The proposition was that minimal vocabularies in Pakistan are not anomalies or exceptions, but part of a more layered understanding of artistic abstraction in the region.
A decade later, The importance of staying quiet returns as a year-long dialogic exchange between Butt and Ansari. This time, the programme will examine the development of practices that have deliberately engaged minimal or abstract strategies.
The first exhibition of The importance of staying quiet opens with Lala Rukh’s photographic archives from her years at the University of Chicago (1974–76). While pursuing a second master’s degree at nearly thirty, Lala already had a trained eye, but these images reveal the sharpening of her framing and the intent of her gaze. This exhibition revisits that gaze, bringing together early works that carry a cinematic sense of composition before arriving at her later language of minimal abstraction.
Talal Al Najjar: Mesh & Mayhem
Tabari Artspace, DIFC
September 27 - October 24
Mesh & Mayhem unravels a terrain where digital architectures and localized memory entwine, forming a fabric stretched thin across speculative futures and fractured realities.
Video game engines, with their banalized depictions of violence and their indifference to cultural specificity, loom large as a visual and conceptual language. Al Najjar offers blueprints of cities and avatars of people reduced to playfields, where geopolitical scars are fictionalized into battle maps and rendered as scenery.
Within this frame, Gulf history becomes a mesh of contradictory desires: the drive to codify heritage into monumental form colliding with the unruly excess of digital invention. What emerges is an imagined archive of futures—some absurd, some unsettling—where memory, fantasy, and spectacle converge.
Curated by Salem AlSuwaidi.