Exhibitions to Visit in Dubai - Autumn 2026
A new season of exhibitions in Dubai is underway, and after going through all the listings and press releases, these are the ones I’m interested in visiting. I’m happy to see a couple of new or recently opened spaces hosting exhibitions (OMIC, Mussawir Contemporary).
The exhibitions are added in the order of their opening dates. The first one opened is from the summer list, but since I’ve not yet visited it, I included it here.
Habeeb M. Abu-Futtaim: The Ongoing Performance of Melancholia & Songs in Solitude
Bayt AlMamzar
Until October 2, 2026
Habeeb M. Abu-Futtaim presents two interconnected exhibitions presenting multiple bodies of work developed over the past ten years, drawing from an artistic practice shaped by sustained research, investigation, and critical inquiry.
Rather than functioning as separate exhibitions, The Ongoing Performance of Melancholia and Songs in Solitude unfold as two interconnected chapters of a single artistic inquiry, moving between the personal and the political, revealing how solitude, memory, and collective imagination continually shape one another.
While Songs in Solitude reflects on the intimate space of artistic practice through playfulness, imagination, intimacy, and selfhood, The Ongoing Performance of Melancholia turns outward to examine the inherited performances of collective identity and the burden of unrealized political futures.
Working across painting, installation, performance, video, and writing, Abu-Futtaim investigates the construction and performance of collective identities, examining how inherited symbols, political imaginaries, and cultural narratives become internalized as expressions of belonging.
Curated by Mo Reda.
Hamad Almuzaini: Precarious Beings
Tashkeel, Nad Al Sheba
September 1 - October 11, 2026
Precarious Beings turns its attention to the quiet, often unnoticed elements that contribute to the formation of cities. From broken poles loosely securing an electrical box to a maintenance worker’s discarded glove, the works stem from accumulated observations of Kuwait City’s most ordinary details.
Revisiting these observations becomes a way to consider how meaning is produced within public space. What does it signify when something is left broken, adapted, or abandoned? How do informal gestures, everyday behaviours, and overlooked infrastructures contribute to a shared sense of place?
https://tashkeel.org/exhibitions/precarious-beings
Nothing Worth Mentioning
Kutubna Cultural Center, Nadd Al Hamar
September 5 – September 27, 2026
Fatima Albudoor, She and the Sea
“Can a feeling be archived?” is the question at the heart of Nothing Worth Mentioning, a photography exhibition featuring more than 40 works by 16 photographers based in the UAE.
The exhibition brings attention to finding beauty and meaning in the small moments of everyday life, personal rituals, routines, brief encounters, simple gestures and humble places we often overlook.
It reminds us that sometimes the things we dismiss as ordinary are the things that tell us who we are, where we come from, and what we remember.
Curated by Ola Allouz.
Artists:
Abdallah Alastad
Abdulla Al Ghurair
Abdulla Alblooshi
Aisha Esmaeilzadeh
Akhilesh Nair
April Ann Vocal
Ayesha Alyassi
Fatima Al Amiri
Fatima Albudoor
Judite Serafim
Latifa Almazrouei
Maitha Alqassmi
Maria Khodzhamberdieva
Mohamed Al Alawi
Ola Allouz
Preschelle Ann Bigueras
Sara Al Shamsi
The sky held it, the earth remembered
Ishara Art Foundation, Alserkal Avenue
September 11 - December 15, 2026
Sarker Protick, 16 Eskaton Garden I, from the series Dhaka 1217 (2011–2026)
The exhibition examines how land, water, and the cosmos serve as living archives of memory and history. Through photography, moving image, and installation, the exhibition proposes that the environment bears the material traces of ecological change, preserving them across deep time.
Artists:
Rohini Devasher
Sarker Protick
Shahana Rajani
https://www.ishara.org/exhibition/the-sky-held-it-the-earth-remembered/
ReVision
Mussawir Contemporary, Al Quoz 1
September 15 - October 5, 2026
Sophiya Khwaja
ReVision brings together works on paper that explore this space between thought and material form, tracing the ways memory, perception, landscape, and gesture take shape through the process of making.
Artists:
Behnoosh Feiz
Naazish Ata Ullah
Sara Masinaei
Sophiya Khwaja
Library Circles: Rend Beiruti
Jameel Arts Centre
September 16, 2026 - January 11, 2027
A research display by Rend Beiruti. Beiruti investigates the baqala as a vital urban entity in Dubai, exploring its history, its influence on urban development, and its role as a cultural signal. The project documents how these ubiquitous neighborhood grocery stores have both shaped and been shaped by Dubai’s rapid expansion over the past century.
The display maps these shifts, highlighting how the physical character of the baqala adapts across different areas: from historic streets to newer urban developments like JVC and Dubai Production City. Through a rich assemblage of photographs, mapping, and archival documents, the display brings together the findings of this urban investigation.
https://jameelartscentre.org/whats-on/library-circles-rend-beiruti/
Stephan Kaluza: From Dust to Bloom
JD Malat Gallery
September 16 - October 31, 2026
Stephan Kaluza’s painting practice is fundamentally concerned with depictions of nature—whether in the form of hyper-realistic oil-on-canvas works or near-abstract renderings. These two modes of painting should not be viewed as separate bodies of work; rather, they represent different states of the same subject—distinct stages in a process of transformation.
A seemingly idyllic scene is depicted. Yet, not everything in these images is pure nature: disruptions creep in, and appearances prove deceptive. The ostentatious beauty of nature—captured in the nunc stans, the timeless "now"—is thus rendered open to question. At first glance, the paintings appear to be precise, almost preservative images of an intact world—until a second layer emerges, sharply challenging what is being seen.
https://www.jdmalat.com/exhibitions/131-from-dust-to-bloom-dubai/
Essence of Egypt
Fann À Porter, Jumeirah
September 17 - November 25, 2026
Nabil Anani, Intifada, 1988
A presentation of Palestinian artistic journeys shaped in Egypt and inspired by its art and culture spanning from the 1960s to the early 2000s. The works reveal a diversity of media and approaches—ranging from printmaking and etching to mixed media, leather works, and large-scale compositions.
Despite their shared educational background, each artist developed a distinct visual language, responding to contemporary events and experiences. Considered together, the works offer insight into the influence of mobility, exchange and experimentation on the formation of modern Arab art.
Artists:
Abdul Rahman Al Muzayyen (b. 1943)
Mostafa Al Hallaj (1938-2002)
Nabil Anani (b. 1943)
Kamel Al Moghani (1944-2008)
Samira Badran (b. 1954)
Tayseer Barakat (b. 1959)
Nothing Unusual
OMIC Cultural Hub, Goshi Warehouse City, Al Quoz Industrial Area 3
September 18 - October 19, 2026
Gonzalo Rodriguez Gómez, Bami
Nothing here is particularly unusual. A landscape is still a landscape. A body remains a body. An object remains what we recognize it to be. And yet, somewhere between what we know and how it is seen, something shifts.
Nothing Unusual brings together a diverse group of artists whose distinct approaches transform familiar subjects into deeply personal visual experiences. Through color, material, texture, form, and imagination, the ordinary is not reinvented, but made newly visible.
Perhaps nothing unusual is happening. It's simply seen another way.
Curated by Narges Soleimanzadeh.
Artists:
Ali Ettehad
Curro Gómez
Elizaveta Pugacheva
Elham Shafaei
Gonzalo Rodriguez Gómez
Manish Mundra
Maryam Lamei
Nujoom Alghanem
Richa Nirwan
Solimar Miller
Talal Altukhaes
Tamer Karam
Shezad Dawood: The New Dream Machine Project
Jameel Arts Centre
September 19 - November 1, 2026
New Dream Machine Project (2011, 15 min)
Inspired by Brion Gysin’s prototype Dream Machine created in the 1960s, this film documents a concert featuring the acclaimed Bedouin: Master Musicians of Jajouka (the house band at Gysin’s ‘1001 Nights’ restaurant in Morocco) and a kinetic light sculpture, designed to emit hypnotic light waves to the audience. Edited to the same flicker rate and matching sonic rate of the rotation of the Dream Machine sculpture and filmed at the Cinematheque de Tanger, this work also pays tribute to Brian Jones’s cult album ‘Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Jajouka’ with contemporary musician Duke Garwood reprising Jones’s role on stage.
New Dream Machine Project II (2013, 14 min)
Cut to the same rpm (revolutions per minute) as the machine, the second film features the second staging of the kinetic light sculpture with a live performance by the experimental musical group Praed, in collaboration with the Paris-based soprano and saxophonist Stéphane Rives and electric guitar player Sharif Sehnaoui. Formed in 2006 by Swiss musician Paed Conca and Lebanese artist and musician Raed Yassin, the Praed duo experiments with a complex and vast terrain of sonic and musical influences and geographies. The performance took place at Parasol Unit London as part of Parasolstice – Winter Lights project in 2012.
https://jameelartscentre.org/whats-on/film-shezad-dawood-the-new-dream-machine-project/
Sara Masinaei: Boundaries and Breaches
Dom Art Projects
September 23 - October 18, 2026
Boundaries and Breaches explores the sensory and psychological experience of urban space. While it may appear liminal—a gap between destinations—this space is highly charged. It sustains personal memory, shapes our daily routines, and organises how we perceive the world around us. It preserves traces of use and loss, bearing witness to rupture, erosion, and forgetting.
Private World
Green Art Gallery, Alserkal Avenue
September 23 – October 24, 2026
Sohrab Hura, The finally found each other, 2024
An intimate group exhibition exploring solitude, inward attention and personal experience.
Across the exhibition, intimacy takes different forms: through personal observation, fragments and fleeting moments, relationships and lived experience, or through atmospheric and psychologically charged spaces.
Artists:
Khaled Jarada
Lulua Alyahya
Rami Farook
Sohrab Hura
What the Sea Leaves Behind: Stories of fishing, memory and environmental resilience in the Gulf
Gulf Photo Plus, Alserkal Avenue
September 23 - November 7, 2026
Reinilda Dernison
The Gulf is a place of extremes. Its waters are among the warmest and most saline in the world, and its coastlines are being reshaped at extraordinary speed. Yet for generations, people have made their lives here by reading the sea: knowing where fish gather, when the tides turn, which creatures can be harvested, and when to stay ashore. Across Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, small-scale fishing communities are now navigating a sea that is changing beneath them. Rising temperatures and sea levels, altered salinity, coastal development and overfishing are placing growing pressure on both marine ecosystems and the people who depend on them.
Curated by Richa Syal.
Artists:
Maureen Daly
Reem Mohammed
Reinilda Dernison
Dalal Al-Obaidi: Frogs, Jazz & Blisters
Taymour Grahne Projects, Alserkal Avenue
September 23 – November 11, 2026
Dalal Al-Obaidi takes us into a life split between two worlds, London and Kuwait.
This body of new paintings was sparked by considering what it means to live in two places, or "to be two Dalals" as the artist put it, without being entirely settled in either identity. The work was motivated by London, but inspired by life in Kuwait - a fairly accurate summation of the artist's life over the past few years. The exhibition's title, a memorable phrase, came to Al-Obaidi one night in London, when recalling one particular night of friends, music, laughter and dancing. It describes, she says, the feeling of "coming down from a high", the gradual settling back to the quieter pace of life in Kuwait after a whirlwind of experiences, emotions and impressions in London.
https://taymourgrahne.com/exhibitions/dalal-al-obaidi-frogs-jazz-and-blisters
The importance of staying quiet: 6. Open Forms
Grey Noise, Alserkal Avenue
September 23 - December 31, 2026
Faheem Abbas, Untitled, 2025
Open Forms alludes to a way of looking that we have been negotiating since our art school years. We are drawn to artists with a certain peculiarity, whose work seems to emerge from a self-imposed stillness, at some distance from the noise around them. It is a desire to address how they approach conceptual developments that move away from narrative, focusing instead on making and the material through which the abstract is constructed. — Saira Ansari / Umer Butt
This is the sixth and final exhibition of the 2025-2026 iteration of ‘The importance of staying quiet’.
Artists:
Ali Kazim
Ayessha Quraishi
Bani Abidi
Fahd Burki
Faheem Abbas
Fatima Haider
Faraz Aamer Khan
Fazal Rizvi
Inaam Zafar
Iqra Tanveer
Lala Rukh
Mussarat Mirza
Sara Salman
Seher Shah
Shahid Sajjad
Zara Mahmood
Zubeida Agha