Exhibitions to Visit in Dubai - Summer 2026
If you are in Dubai this summer, here’s a list of exhibitions I plan to visit. As I do with these seasonal listings, I may add more as and when they are announced, so please do keep checking back.
Two exhibitions below were in my list of Spring exhibitions that I’d like to highlight here too. I visited them a last week and really liked them:
Jane Beveridge’s LOCAL at XVA Gallery, until June 18
Moza Al Falasi’s Unfolding at Tashkeel, until June 25
A few more from the Spring list that will remain open during the summer:
Observers of Change at Etihad Museum, until June 30
Safwan Dahloul: The Eye: An Aperture Into the Soul at Ayyam Gallery, until July 4
Five Painters at Taymour Grahne Projects, until July 11
Collage Art at Kutubna Cultural Center, until August 31
Global Positioning System at Jameel Arts Centre, until October 4
There is also Interwoven at House of Arts in Expo City Dubai which opened during the winter in 2025 and is on until the end of this year.
The following are listed in the order of the opening dates. Images and text are extracts from the exhibition websites/press releases/Instagram accounts.
Atieh Sohrabi, Farshid Shafiey, Baran Shafiey: All In The Family
Leila Heller Gallery, Alserkal Avenue
May 12 - July 5, 2026
Atieh Sohrabi, Eternal Blossoms, 2025
Artists, Atieh Sohrabi, Farshid Shafiey, and their daughter Baran Shafiey form a remarkable artistic trio, by bringing their unique vision to the canvas while sharing a common creative thread.
The exhibition explores the dialogue that emerges between generations of artists, revealing how personal histories, cultural memory, and individual artistic languages intersect. Through painting and illustration, the artists reflect on themes of identity, everyday life, and imagination, offering viewers an intimate glimpse into the visual worlds that shape their creative practices.
Sultan Bin Fahad: Blue Note
Leila Heller Gallery, Alserkal Avenue
May 12 - September 13, 2026
In The Blue Note, Sultan Bin Fahad turns to jazz not simply as a musical genre, but as a living cultural form, one shaped by memory, faith, improvisation, and collective expression. Through painting, textile-like bead works, and installation, the exhibition explores the early history of jazz and its movement across geographies, identities, and belief systems. Rooted in archival research and oral histories, The Blue Note examines how jazz emerged as both sound and social language: a form of rhythm inseparable from spirituality, resistance, and community.
https://www.leilahellergallery.com/exhibitions/sultan-bin-fahad-blue-note
Time That Grows Slowly
Dom Projects, Al Khayat Avenue
May 13 - September 13, 2026
Odonchimeg Davaadorj, Baiser Toxique, 2021
The exhibition is inspired by ideas attuned to vegetal temporalities of being in the world, reflecting on philosophical reflections of time as growth rather than movement. The exhibition features works by cross-regional artists, many of whom have never been shown in Dubai before. Time, as humans experience it, is inseparable from the vegetal. The oxygen we breathe, the food we consume, the rhythms of agriculture and settlement — all are shaped by plant life. Yet this dependency remains largely invisible. Time That Grows Slowly seeks to render it perceptible, exploring whether it is possible to inhabit, even momentarily, the ‘umwelt’ of plants: to perceive the world from a vegetal perspective. Grouped around site-specific installations attentive to care and interspecies communication, the exhibition engages ecological, feminist, philosophical, and postcolonial concerns.
Curator: Alexander Burenkov
Artists:
Antoine Renard (France)
Farah Soltani (Iran / UAE)
Kwama Frigaux (Ghana / France)
Maha Alasaker (Kuwait / UAE)
Mevlana Lipp (Germany)
Nadia Waheed (Saudi Arabia / Pakistan / USA)
Odonchimeg Davaadorj (Mongolia / France)
Patricia Domínguez (Chile)
Shaima Shamsi (Saudi Arabia / Bahrain / UAE)
Srijon Chowdhury (Bangladesh / USA)
Sulafa Mohammed (UAE)
Tabita Rezaire (France)
https://domprojects.art/exhibitions/timethatgrowsslowly
Petr Kirusha: Every Moment is a Fresh Beginning
Dom Projects, Al Khayat Avenue
May 13 - September 13, 2026
A solo presentation by Petr Kirusha (b. 1978, Russia/Latvia), featuring works developed during his residency at Dom Art Projects amid a period of heightened geopolitical tension between the US and Iran. During his time in Dubai, Kirusha documented the landscapes of Al Quoz alongside the cityscape of Dubai, while producing a series of drawings shaped by the intensity of this period, capturing both the immediate environment and the psychological atmosphere of the time. These observations later evolved into paintings and works on paper.
Kirusha’s practice reconsiders painting through the conditions of the screen. For him, contemporary painting exists in close relation to light and illumination, from LED backlighting to the red-orange glow of the urban night sky, and the subtle shifts of pixels in low light. He translates this visual instability into moments of stillness, capturing a sense of vibration at the edge of perception. Working with a post-digital approach to colour, he leaves the white of the paper active, akin to a blank screen, and employs a technique that preserve luminosity in the lower layers of paint.
https://domprojects.art/exhibitions/petrkirusha
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.
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/
Alia Zaal: In Plain Sight
June 4 - September 15, 2026
Gallery Isabelle, Alserkal Avenue
Alia Zaal’s solo exhibition, In Plain Sight, consists of paintings on canvas, paper, and ceramic tiles that depict intimate fragments and extracts of landscapes beloved by the artist. Highlighting details of familiar plants, trees, and flora from the scrublands of Khawaneej, a suburb in Dubai, and the mangroves and mudflats of Abu Dhabi’s coastline, the works present a mediation on site-specificity and lived experience rather than romantic scenes of territory.
https://www.ivde.net/exhibitions/90-in-plain-sight-alia-zaal/
Mohammed Kazem: Scenes From the Nineties
June 4 - September 15, 2026
Gallery Isabelle, Alserkal Avenue
This exhibition brings together a rare group of early works on paper by Mohammed Kazem, dating from the 1990s, a formative period in the career of an artist whose practice has contributed significantly to the development of contemporary art in the United Arab Emirates. Produced at a moment of intense experimentation, these works reveal the emergence of concerns that continue to resonate throughout Kazem’s oeuvre: observation, repetition, materiality, and an enduring fascination with the traces through which we experience the world.
https://www.ivde.net/exhibitions/91-scenes-from-the-nineties-mohammed-kazem/
The Two Walks: Works on Paper selected by Judy Karkour
Carbon 12, Alserkal Avenue
June 4 - September 5, 2026
Bernhard Buhmann, Shelter, 2026
A group show of new and archival works on paper bringing together 14 artists with distinct material and artistic backgrounds, exploring paper as a medium that challenges scale as grandiose. Each artist uses and manipulates it in different ways that expand beyond its traditional associations.
Artists:
Amba Sayal-Bennett
Amir Khojasteh
André Butzer
Bernhard Buhmann
Edgar Orlaineta
Faris Alshafar
Mayar Obedo
Monika Grabuschnigg
Nadine Ghandour
Nour Malas
Olaf Breuning
Philip Mueller
Sarah Almehairi
Solimar Miller
Cross Scripts
Lawrie Shabibi, Alserkal Avenue
June 6 - July 31, 2026
Farhad Ahrarnia, For the Love of Love and Her Soft Hours, 2021-2022
Across painting, sculpture, furniture, jewellery and textiles, the exhibition traces a series of overlapping visual languages. Geometry becomes ornament. Utility becomes sculpture. Traditional techniques are reimagined through contemporary forms. Historical references, material traditions and systems of making are translated and reimagined, revealing unexpected connections between makers working across different generations and geographies.
Artists:
Areen Hassan
Bernhard Buhmann
Carlo Massoud
Driss Ouadahi
Farhad Ahrarnia
Hamra Abbas
Ishmael Randall-Weeks
KAMEH
Kamrooz Aram
Mary-Lynn Massoud
Mehdi Moutashar
Nada Debs
Nadine Kanso
Omar Al Gurg
Rasha Nawam
Sarah Almehairi
Timo Nasseri
Zein Daouk
https://www.lawrieshabibi.com/exhibitions/202-cross-scripts/overview/
Made in the UAE
JD Malat Gallery
June 11 - July 1, 2026
Made in the UAE is a new curatorial initiative dedicated to supporting and showcasing emerging contemporary artists working across the United Arab Emirates. Bringing together voices from painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and video, the project reflects the diversity, energy, and cultural dynamism of the region’s evolving art scene.
Artists:
Ahmed Emad
Anila Ashraf
Camelia Mohebi
Elizaveta Pugacheva
Samo Shalaby
Sasan Nasernia
Yousif Albadi
https://www.jdmalat.com/exhibitions/128-made-in-the-uae-dubai/