November is another hyper “art month” in Dubai, in addition to April. There are several new exhibitions opening for the autumn/winter season, and a few short term exhibitions that coincide with “art week” because of Frieze Abu Dhabi.
I’ve sifted through the press releases and Instagram posts (a plea to the galleries in Dubai, PLEASE update your websites) and made a selection of exhibitions that I’m interested in visiting.
The exhibitions are added in the order of their opening dates and I’ve included a few exhibitions from the Autumn 2026 list that are on until December and a couple until March 2027.
Images and text are extracts from the exhibition websites/press releases/Instagram accounts.
A Place Has Its Own Grammar
Mussawir Contemporary
November 13 - December 4
A Place Has Its Own Grammar considers everyday life as a site of performance, examining how individual actions intersect with collective habits, expectations and social conventions. Through photography, video and painting, the exhibition explores the subtle relationship between learned behaviour, individual expression and the unspoken codes that shape everyday interaction.
Curated by Priyanka Mehra.
Artists:
Ali Talaat
Ammar Al Attar
Mona Ayyash
Mouza Al Hamrani
Richi Bhatia
Shaima Shamsi
Mukesh Shah: Eight Neons
XVA Gallery
November 14 - December 10, 2026
Mukesh Shah pays homage to the mark-making power of words and the artisanship of neon signs. The exhibition features works from UTOPA (2021–2026) and PLAYLIST (2017–2020), two word-art series through which Shah explores the zeitgeist.
“I love words and neon, they are like pizza and coke!” - Mukesh Shah
History Otherwise: Women Modernists from the Arab World
Concrete, Alserkal Avenue
November 15 - 22, 2026
Asmahan Elfergani, The Libyan Woman, 1972
Working across the 20th century in the Arab world and beyond, these artists actively engaged with the social and political realities of their time. Their work reflects on changing lifestyles, political shifts, urban development, decolonisation efforts, and shifting gender roles, while also pushing the boundaries of what modern art can be by incorporating vernacular materials and methods of making into their practices.
The exhibition begins with a selection of exhibition posters of these women artists, dating from the 1940s to the 1990s. This is a key part of the exhibition’s story - although many of these artists have been overlooked by art history and are only now beginning to receive greater attention and documentation, they were present and active participants in the artistic and cultural life of the region. They publicly exhibited their work, developed new artistic languages, formed groups and collectives, and contributed to the changing social, political and cultural landscape of the Arab world.
Curated by Suheyla Takesh and Rémi Homs.
Return to Sender: Postcard project by Non-aligned Constellations Working Group
November 15 - 22, 2026
Studio 7, Warehouse 51, Alserkal Avenue
Drawing on unofficial archives, from personal collections to flea market finds, the research looks to the places where histories survive outside institutions. Designed by Balmazović, the postcards act as vignettes into this research, commemorating small, seemingly insignificant or forgotten stories. The postcards draw inspiration from First Day Covers (FDCs), the commemorative envelopes and stamps often produced to mark key moments in history, bringing this practice into a contemporary context.
What does it mean to return to these histories? To whom are they addressed, and who receives them now? Each postcard carries a link to three short texts by the working group, as well as to a collectively built playlist that attends to the sonics of resistance. Visitors are invited to send the postcards to friends in other parts of the world, enacting analogue forms of publishing and distribution, and extending the constellation with every card sent.
Curated by Angelina Radaković, Bojana Piškur, Natalija Vujošević.
https://alserkal.online/event/return-to-sender
Sliman Mansour: Promises and Scars
November 15 - 22, 2026
Warehouse 46, Alserkal Avenue
Promises and Scars presents five decades of Sliman Mansour’s relentless search for aesthetic forms and media capable of expressing and responding to the Palestinian condition. Mansour’s work is often cast as the dream factory of a people denied its homeland and its wholeness. From a single mother’s dream of a house to the mud’s pledge of a new vision and the storm’s promise of a rainbow, his art gave form to hopes both intimate and collective, foretelling an anti-colonial romance with a guaranteed happy ending.
While many saw in him an iconographer of national icons, he was also an iconoclast, repeatedly returning to his own pictures to strip them of the religiosity with which we had endowed them, and to reveal the tragic fate of his earlier romantic heroes.
Laden with our wounds, Sliman Mansour departed our world in August of this year. This exhibition, originally planned to open in April in his presence, now opens in his bitter absence.
Presented by George Al Ama and Fann À Porter.
https://alserkal.online/event/promises-and-scars
(I wrote a few words about him here after the news of his death.)
The Days Go On
Ayyam Gallery, Alserkal Avenue
November 16, 2026 - January 1, 2027
Celebrating Ayyam Gallery’s 20th anniversary, the exhibition seeks to honour a journey defined by continuity, resilience, and artistic exchange. Alongside co-curators Safwan Dahoul and Ali Kaaf, director Maya Samawi aims to bring together works by all the artists who have shaped Ayyam over the past twenty years. Each curator represents a continuous artistic timeline in which the past and present complete one another and remain undeniably connected. The exhibition is accompanied by an archive that traces this history as fully as possible, not merely the story of a gallery, but of the artists, people, places, relationships, and circumstances that have shaped it.
Curated by Safwan Dahoul, Ali Kaaf, Maya Samawi.
Artists:
Youssef Abdelke, Safwan Dahoul, Mounzer Kamnakache, Fadi Yazigi, Abdullah Murad, Assad Arabi, Nassouh Zaghlouleh, Mouneer Al Shaarani, Walid El Masri, Kais Salman, Nihad Al Turk, Mouteea Murad, Mohannad Orabi, Omran Younes, Abdul Karim Majdal Al-Beik, Ammar Al-Beik, Asma Fayoumi, Samia Halaby, Tammam Azzam, Leila Nseir, Moustafa Fathi, Othman Moussa, Oussama Diab, Khaled Takreti, Thaier Helal, Nadim Karam, Rima Salamoun, Elias Izoli, Sadik Kwaish Alfraji, Mohamad Badr, Lara Zankoul, Lara Attallah, Ammar Abd Rabbo, Farzad Kohan Mousawi, Afshin Pirhashemi, Faisal Samra, Abdulnasser Gharem, Fathallah Zamroud, Shurooq Amin, Mohammad Bozorgi, Sama Alshaibi, Noor Bahjat, Rula Halawani, Khaled Jarrar, Rashed Al Shashai, Roshanak Aminelahi, Abdalla Al Omari, Rashid Al Khalifa, Muatasim Alkubaisy, Khaled Akil, Athar Jaber, and Ali Kaaf.
https://www.ayyamgallery.com/exhibitions/284-the-days-go-on-20-years-of-ayyam-gallery/overview/
Yaw Owusu: Where the Tide Flows, and the Dunes Gather
November 16, 2026 - January 10, 2027
Efie Gallery, Alserkal Avenue
Bringing together works on paper, textured canvases, and mixed-media sculptures, Where the Tide Flows, and the Dunes Gather extends Owusu’s sustained inquiry into value: how it is assigned, circulated, diminished, and ultimately transformed. Working with materials already embedded within systems of exchange, Owusu considers currency not simply as an economic instrument, but as a social language through which hierarchies of worth are constructed and maintained.
Central to the exhibition is the unveiling of a new body of works on paper, created from the remnants and residue of the alchemical processes through which Owusu produces his sculptural works. These works introduce an inverse material logic to his practice. His sculptures, composed from some of the lowest-denomination coins in circulation, assume surfaces that shimmer with an almost golden luminosity. Through accumulation, repetition, and transformation, objects of negligible individual worth acquire an imposing material presence. The contradiction is deliberate: what appears precious is constructed from that which has been assigned little value.
https://efiegallery.com/articles/where-the-tide-flows-and-the-dunes-gather-yaw-owusu
The following exhibitions are from the Autumn 2026 list that go on till mid-late December and beyond:
The sky held it, the earth remembered
Ishara Art Foundation, Alserkal Avenue
Until 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/
The importance of staying quiet: 6. Open Forms
Grey Noise, Alserkal Avenue
Until December 30, 2026
Zara Mahmood, Vignettes 4 (set of 6), 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
for now, in between orbits
Bayt AlMamzar
Until December 24, 2026
Across installation, sound and photography, the exhibition reflects on what lingers yet remains beyond our grasp. The artists consider perception, temporality and grief as shifting orbits we drift away from, re-centre within and inevitably return to. Here, stillness becomes a way of paying attention, and fading a way of holding on.
Curated by May Alqaydi.
Artists:
Hadeyeh Badri
Hyun Ah Kwon
Kirsty Sim
Matter of Light
Dom Art Projects, Al Khayat Avenue
Until March 10, 2027
The Matter of Light takes on both the formal and perceptual aspects of light as it operates within modern and contemporary art. Light is what allows us to perceive the world around us. When we look at our surroundings, what we are seeing are not objects themselves, but rather the light that bounces off of them, communicating to us their contours.
But light also has other ways of affecting our perception. Throughout the history of the world, light has been assigned many different kinds of meaning, including the mystical, the metaphysical, and the sacred. Scientific advancements from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly discoveries related to microscopic matter and the theory of relativity turned the attention of the spheres of art and culture to the mechanisms of light. Modernism approached the topic from a formal, analytical method. And while throughout the last century artistic guidelines have changed dramatically, veering sharply from the dominance of modernist trends, this emphasis on formal analysis has now been incorporated into the body of contemporary art.
Curated by Eugenia Kikodze.
Artists:
Akram Zaatari
Andrey Grositsky
Armen Bugayan
Boris Turetsky
Blue Soup Group
David Ter-Oganyan
Dmitri Prigov
Eduard Steinberg
Elena Nemkova
Iced Architects
Ilya Kabakov
Kamal Boullata
Koka Ramishvili
Oleg Vassiliev
Pavel Pepperstein
PPSS Group
Susan Hefuna
Timo Nasseri
Vladimir Andreenkov
Yuri Zlotnikov
Zaha Hadid
Zoulikha Bouabdellah
Salah Elmur: Just as the Heart of a Mango is a Stone
Jameel Arts Centre
Until March 14, 2027
Bringing together paintings, archival photographs, sketches and ephemera, this exhibition offers an immersive encounter with Salah Elmur’s world, one where memory, landscape and identity merge and ripple through time. This show, focusing on works produced after 2018, explores the artist’s shifting sense of belonging and distance from his homeland, Sudan, in times of exile and political rupture.
Curated by Zain Al Saie and Qutouf Elobaid.