Exhibitions To Visit in Dubai - Spring 2026
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.
Curated by Hammad Nasar, 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.
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. These works do not attempt to stabilize history, but dwell in its distortions, where fragility and power remain entangled.
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
An exhibition 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. But when skillfully worked, it reflects a gentleness and serenity that engages all senses and invites reflection. We are grateful to XVA Gallery for hosting the Academy of Visual Arts’ Annual Faculty Show 2026.
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
Global Positioning System
Jameel Arts Centre
May 9 - October 4, 2026
Global Positioning System is an exhibition 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. Before routes are built, they are projected; before territories are fixed, they are narrated. ‘Global Positioning System’ engages these imaginaries, suggesting that orientation is as much about traversing as it is composing new worlds.
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/
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. We live in a particular experience, where the process of existing and the intimacies within it are constantly transforming with the tensions of holding on to a nostalgic past and navigating uncertain futures. Nowhere else is this more acutely felt than in the Gulf, where the pace of transformation has made the past feel simultaneously very close and increasingly difficult to hold.
Curated by Sara bin Safwan.
Artists:
Dalal Al-Obaidi
Hawazin Alotaibi
Hayfa Algwaiz
Latifa Alajlan
Roudhah Al Mazrouei
https://taymourgrahne.com/exhibitions/group-show-five-painters