Exhibitions To Visit in Dubai - Spring 2026
A new season of exhibitions is upon us and as I’ve been doing since last year, here are the ones that I’d like to visit. I will add more as and when they are announced, so do keep checking back.
The exhibitions are listed in the order of the opening dates.
The first two opened during the winter season.
Images and text are extracts from the exhibition websites/press releases/Instagram accounts.
Urdu Worlds
Ishara Art Foundation
Until June 13, 2026
Urdu Worlds marks the first-ever contemporary art exhibition dedicated to the Urdu language in the UAE.
The exhibition is a visual conversation around language between Ali Kazim and Zarina, and the first comprehensive presentation of Kazim’s works in the GCC. The show explores how language provides the tools with which we create and shape our internal ‘worlds’.Words, rather than simply describing our surroundings, give rise to our private lived experiences and shared cultural understandings.
Curated by Hammad Nasar.
Artists:
Ali Kazim
Zarina
https://www.ishara.org/exhibition/urdu-worlds/
Observers of Change
Etihad Museum
Until June 30, 2026
The exhibition traces the evolution of the UAE’s artistic identity over five decades. Drawing from the Barjeel Art Foundation collection it features more than 60 works by pioneering and contemporary artists who have lived and worked in the UAE since 1971. Their works document the nation’s rapid social, economic, and urban transformation through painting, photography, sculpture, and mixed media.
Curated by Rémi Homs.
Artists: Ebtisam Abdulaziz, Khalil Abdulwahed, Ali Al Abdan, Ammar Al Attar, Afra Al Dhaheri, Mahra Al Falahi, Reem Al Ghaith, Nujoom Alghanem, Moosa Al Halyan, Fatma Al Joker, Hessa Al Joker, Hala Al Kouatli, Diaa Allam, Hashel Al Lamki, Salma Al Merri, Hussain Al Mossawi, Ziad Al Najjar, Miramar Al Nayyar, Abdul Qader Al Rais, Ismail Al Rifai, Farah Al Qasimi, Mohammed Al Qassab, Noor Al Suwaidi, Ziad Antar, Mattar Bin Lahej, Lateefa Bint Maktoum, eL Seed, Ahmed Emad, Rami Farook, Lamia Gargash, Hazem Harb, Layla Juma, Mohammed Kazem, Fatma Lootah, Najat Makki, Mohamed Mandi, Camelia Mohebi, Faeza Mubarak, Nasir Nasrallah, Munira Nuseibeh, Driss Ouadahi, Sameeha Rajab, Nabil Safwat, Abdul Raheem Salem, Hassan Sharif, Hussain Sharif, Obaid Suroor, Yacoub Yousef
https://www.instagram.com/etihadmuseum/
https://www.instagram.com/barjeelart/
https://dubaiculture.gov.ae/en/events/Barjeel-Art-Foundation
Peripheral Acts: I Come To My Island by Arnold Barretto
Studio 13, Bel Jafla Complex, Warehouse 13, Al Quoz
April 1 - 30, 2026
"I Come to My Island is inspired not only by this street, but by my father’s experience working in Al Quoz. It’s a place where he built lifelong friendships, and one he still returns to whenever something needs to be done. For this residency, I revisit that experience imagining and creating islands like the one he knew: spaces people inhabit briefly, to give to the land, take from it, and then return to their lives.
I’m also interested in how the islands shifts over the course of the month. During the years that my dad worked in the UAE - his body changed. Almost as if he was a photo paper getting exposed to the sun and the wind. The materials I’ve used are intentionally sensitive to the elements. Part of this piece is to observe and document this change.” — Arnold Barretto
https://www.instagram.com/peripheral_acts
https://www.instagram.com/studiothirteen_dxb/
https://www.arnoldbarretto.com
Ojalá/Oxalá
1604 Art Space, Blue Bay Tower, Business Bay
April 17 - 26, 2026
Hope, often spoken as faith, connects Latin America and Southwest Asia. Our tongues carry the names of our deities in expressions now taken for granted. “Ojalá/Oxalá”, the transliteration of إن شاء الله in Spanish and Portuguese, traces a transcontinental connection shaped by exchange and belief. Here, we observe how hope becomes culture—formed through migration, labour, spirituality, and the ongoing construction of home. Each artist in this exhibition inhabits a distinct experience of Latinidad within Southwest Asia. Rather than offering a singular narrative, this exhibition attends to the complexity and diversity that Latino migration has always carried.
Curated by Andrés Ugartechea Palma.
Artists:
Alexa Christine Mena Tejada
Andrés Ugartechea Palma
Bruna Pereira
Carlos Páez González
Cynthia Acuña
Diego Mendoza
João Ribeiro
José Roberto
Natalia Ulloa Casielles
https://www.1604artspace.com/exhibitions-events/show-all/ojala-oxala
Where We Return
Ava Gallery, Warehouse 64, Alserkal Avenue
April 18 - May 10, 2026
This exhibition traces the forms that home leaves behind. It considers the architectures both material and psychological that persist across distance and time, and the ways in which they are reconstructed through image, object, and gesture.
Bringing together multiple generations of artists, the exhibition maps a geography of interiority. Here, artists act as cartographers of belonging, attentive to what has been held, altered, or lost. Their works move between shelter and exposure, between intimacy and openness.
Artists:
Abbas Yousif
Ahmad Moualla
Amirhossein Bayani
Christopher Joshua Benton
Elham Pourkhani
Elias Ayoub
Farah Ossouli
Harry Lynch
Haya Jarrar
Hossein Amanat
Imad Habbab
Khosrow Hassanzadeh
Nawar Shartouh
Noor Al Suwaidi
Zahra Jewanjee
https://avagallery.art/exhibitions/20-where-we-return-talaar/
All the Lands from Sunrise to Sunset
Green Art Gallery, Alserkal Avenue
April 19 - June 1, 2026
If the 20th century was shaped by the rise of the nation-state, the present moment is increasingly defined by the return—or exposure—of imperial structures: extractive economies, contested geographies, and the symbolic afterlives of domination. Rather than presenting empire as a concluded historical form, the exhibition treats it as an ongoing condition—one that mutates, rebrands, and embeds itself in contemporary visual culture.
Across the exhibition, acts of naming, erasure, reconstruction, and repetition emerge as central gestures. A gulf is renamed; an artifact is rebuilt; a coin circulates; a lion persists only as symbol.
Artists:
Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck
Alla Abdunabi
Fatma Al Ali
Michael Rakowitz
https://www.gagallery.com/exhibitions/all-the-lands-from-sunrise-to-sunset
White
XVA Gallery
April 25 - May 21, 2026
This exhibition is in partnership with the Academy of Visual Arts, University of the Arts Sharjah.
“White” brings us back to the beginning, to Richard Meier’s “white is all colors” where it selflessly reflects all colors. This exhibition highlights faculty’s diverse fascination with and response to “white” through various mediums and techniques. Through mass and void, layers and textures, shade and shadow, warp and weft, and pixels and motion, they reaffirm that white is indeed a forceful adversary, yet worthwhile challenge, not easily conquered and manipulated.
Curated by Tor Seidel.
Artists:
Alina Erimia
Andreea Lonhardt
Georgina Abood
Dr. Iman Ibrahim
Joshua Watts
Maryam Al Qassimi
Dr. Mohamed Yousif
Muatasim Alkubaisy
Muhammad Asad Iqbal
Thaier Helal
Tor Seidel
https://www.xvagallery.com/exhibitions/white/
https://www.xvagallery.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/White-FacultyShow-Catalogue-Spreads16Apr-XVA.pdf
Suitcase Lineages: Parallel Movements, Isolations, and Dispatches
by Richi Bhatia & Hira Khan
Alserkal Arts Foundation, Warehouse 52, Alserkal Avenue
25 April – 17 May, 2026
Two dispersed family archives are brought together as materials distorted by nation-state geography and its attendant fragmentation of history. Shaped by a matrilineal reading of inheritance, the project follows parallel familial trajectories across India, Pakistan, Germany, and now the UAE, where distance structures relation rather than defining rupture.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DXb3qvmjMxb/
https://www.instagram.com/alserkalartsfoundation/
https://richikbhatia.com
https://hirakhan1919.wixsite.com/hira
Solimar Miller: A Continuum of Light
Foundry
May 5 - June 7, 2026
This new body of work brings together a series of mixed media landscapes that trace shifting environments across the UAE, moving from desert interiors to coastal mangroves. Created on cotton and silk velvet, the works follow the quiet progression of light across the course of the day, where trees emerge as enduring anchors within an ever-changing terrain.
Throughout the exhibition, trees appear and recede within the pictorial field, registering delicate changes in visibility and atmosphere.
https://www.emaarmalls.ae/foundry-events/a-continuum-of-light/
SUPERMARKET
Foundry
May 5 - June 7, 2026
A group exhibition presenting UAE-based independent artists, conceived as a platform to support artists who are not represented by galleries. Bringing together a wide range of voices, approaches, and media, the exhibition opens a new space of exchange between artists, audiences, and collectors.
The title SUPERMARKET deliberately borrows from the language of retail, collapsing the distance between artwork and commodity and inviting reflection on how culture is packaged, displayed, circulated, and consumed today.
Artists:
Adele Bea Cipste
Afrorabian
Alina El Assadi
Anita Shishani
ANTI MUSE
Antoine Deeb
Asareh Ebrahimpour
Bayan Dahdah
Camila Schubert
Don
Elisa Arienti
Elizaveta Pugacheva
Farah Soltani
Fats Patrol
Faxon
Fink 22
Ghalia Kalaji
Jude Maharmeh
Juhayda Bittar
Karim El Atrache
Karim Tamerji
Laura Puscasu
Maha Zeibak
Maitha Bushelaibi
Mr Shark
Nessma Djouhri
Preschelle Ann Biqueras
Rabab Tantawy
Raghe Farah
Rania Kamal
Ron John
Saif Chilmiran
Sandra Fadayel
Solimar Miller
The Workshop DXB
Global Positioning System
Jameel Arts Centre
May 9 - October 4, 2026
Global Positioning System is dedicated to mapping and navigation systems. It tells stories of fast cars and donkeys, spinning globes and street barricades, cosmic highways and broken bridges.
Set against contested topographies and simulated landscapes, the exhibition engages with the infrastructure of mobility that enables transport and trade, questioning the promises of speed and progress. It questions home and its coordinates, landscapes in transformation, and what navigation means when the destination is not a place but a recollection.
Curated by Indranjan Banerjee and Lucas Morin.
Artists:
Ana Amorim
Angela Detanico & Rafael Lain
Bani Abidi
Bo Wang
Cinthia Marcelle
Devadeep Gupta
Dima Srouji
Do Ho Suh
Dora Longo Bahia
Fatma Al Ali
Fayçal Baghriche
Fazal Rizvi
Harun Farocki
Hassan Sharif
Heman Chong
Hylozoic/Desires
Lawrence Lek
Lulua Alyahya
Madiha Aijaz
Mahmoud Alhaj
Md Fazla Rabbi Fatiq
Mirna Bamieh
Mohammed Kazem
Nazgol Ansarinia
Seher Naveed
Şener Özmen & Erkan Özgen
Subas Tamang
T. Vinoja
Tatyana Zambrano
Vishwa Shroff
https://jameelartscentre.org/whats-on/global-positioning-system/
Masayoshi Nojo: Hone Intuition
JD Malat Gallery
May 12 - June 9, 2026
Nojo’s work merges contemporary image-making with traditional Japanese aesthetics, drawing from the legacy of Ogata Kōrin and the Rinpa school. His meticulous process, layering marbled acrylic surfaces, silkscreened imagery, and silver and aluminium leaf, produces works that shift subtly with light, movement, and time. In this body of work, intuition operates as both method and atmosphere. Each stage of the process demands precision and immediate concentration, resulting in compositions that carry a calm yet tense presence. Landscapes drawn from multiple locations and personal travels are transformed into images that evoke a shared sense of déjà vu.
https://www.jdmalat.com/exhibitions/125-masayoshi-nojo-hone-intuition-dubai/
Reem Hamed: Marks of Return
1604 Art Space, Blue Bay Tower, Business Bay
May 15 - 23, 2026
Marks of Return follows Reem Hamed’s journeys between Abu Dhabi and Dibba, where routine travel unfolds into a deeper engagement with landscape, memory, and time. Dibba is approached as a living archive shaped by geological presence and layered histories. Through walking, collecting, and observing, Hamed builds a practice rooted in attention and trace. Stone and clay sourced from site become ceramic works, alongside photography, sound, linocut prints, and sculpture.
The opening reception will include a performance by Reem Hamed, followed by a talk with Omar Darwish.
Curated by Sarrah Bashir and Ahmad Al Bissani.
https://www.1604artspace.com/exhibitions-events/show-all/marks-of-return
Moza Al Falasi: Unfolding
Tashkeel
May 15 - June 25, 2026
Moza’s first solo presentation explores memory, loss, and the passing of time. Working across photography, sound, painting, plaster, and fabric, she does not try to document a lost home. Instead, she traces what lingers. Textures that recall walls. Impressions pressed into soft materials. Sounds that appear and fade, much like memory itself.
What emerges is not a single story. Childhood, family, grief, and recent loss overlap and fold in on themselves.
The domestic space becomes vulnerable rather than secure, fractured, layered, incomplete.
Five Painters
Taymour Grahne Projects, Alserkal Avenue
May 16 - July 11, 2026
“The Gulf is in constant, perpetual shift – and the five painters selected in this exhibition are inheritors of its dynamism and continuity. They mark moments of a not so linear, at times disjointed change, whether in the urban landscape or social fabric, in an attempt to reconcile with their surroundings and the movement through it. Outside the contemporary sphere, paintings found in malls, hotels or offices often depict royal families, Arabian horses, falcons and other typical national motifs. On the other hand, the five painters in this exhibition have chosen topics of the unseen and subversive; allowing us to understand the diversity and nuances of cultural dynamics in the Gulf. Whilst all the countries of the formal GCC hold their own histories, there is a shared imaginary and identity that binds them all together.” – Sara bin Safwan, Curator
Artists:
Dalal Al-Obaidi
Hawazin Alotaibi
Hayfa Algwaiz
Latifa Alajlan
Roudhah Al Mazrouei
https://taymourgrahne.com/exhibitions/group-show-five-painters
Safwan Dahloul: The Eye: An Aperture Into the Soul
Ayyam Gallery, Alserkal Avenue
May 16 - July 4, 2026
Dahoul is mostly known for his beautiful melancholic and monochromatic works that present influences from the Cubist style of Picasso ranging to Assyrian and Pharaonic art. Since the late 1980s, the artist began an ongoing body of work investigating the dream state. Simply entitled the Dream series, these works have explored the physical and psychological effects of alienation, solitude, and longing that punctuate the human experience at various stages in life.
https://www.ayyamgallery.com/exhibitions/current-forthcoming/
Collage Art
Kutubna Cultural Center
May 16 - August 31, 2026
Collage Art presents more than 60 artworks by artists from around the world, bringing together works created in both physical and digital mediums. The collection explores themes such as memory, identity, migration, belonging, resilience, spirituality, culture, environment, and the relationship between tradition and modernity.
In this exhibition, artists work with materials like paper, fabric, photos, found objects, and digital tools to build layered images and stories.
Curated by Nora Qudah.
Artists:
Alberto De Blobs
Alexandra Carambellas
Aya Al-Obaidi
Aysha Alshareef
Batool Khalifa
Bettina Kulakowski
Carlie Louise Manalac
Celina Sarieddine
Daniela Godoy-Waheed
Daniolco Lerio
Diana Hancinska
Ekaterina Frolova
Fatima Taher Jewad
Gerald Agutu
Hafsa Kharuri
Hessa Al Maeeni
Hiyam Salman
Homa Abdoli
Irene Isabel Prestinary
Isabela Tavares
Julianna McCarthy
Mariam Bin Hammad
Mathilda Pearce
Nayyab Akram
Nicole Henning
Rabab Zaidi
Rakhshinda Arshad
Razeena Abdurahman
Sabina Heather Hatton
Samata Anand Rao
Sarah Hatem
Saira Safwan
Stacey Kalkowski
Shamma Alfalasi
Shang Salah
Shehzad Afzaal
Shloka Shankar
Sophia El Khoury
Urooj Fatima
Valerie Browning
Vera Volodina
Vito Antonio Lerario
https://www.kutubna.ae/pages/upcoming-exhibits
Jane Beveridge: LOCAL
XVA Gallery
May 23 - June 18 2026
“Swimming pools and construction sites. Dusty DIY stores and haberdasheries. The kind that have been there forever – or at least since 2002, when I arrived in Dubai. Jam-packed from floor to ceiling with thread, fabric, tools, and brightly coloured domestic objects, these spaces are crammed with possibility. They are often overlooked in a city best known for its malls and extravagance, but they are among my most cherished places in Dubai.
DUBAI is a five letter word, as is LOCAL. For years, I have been collecting five-letter words – from TRUST to TRUTH, VOICE to GRACE, ALIVE to TOUCH. Five is the limit of complexity for the human mind, according to mathematician Frank Ramsey. Beyond that number the thresholds for order grow at an extraordinary rate – faster than exponentials, faster than anything we can compute.” — Jane Beveridge
https://www.xvagallery.com/exhibitions/local/