Bassam Freiha Art Foundation's book-club-with-a-difference starts a new season of stories and conversation inspired by books and art. It opens with this reflective writing session centered on memory and personal growth – participants are invited to choose a book, character, [... more]
Mad Cat Comedy’s regular standup night at Xandros in Signature 1 Hotel, TECOM. The cover charge of AED 80 includes one drink.
A music festival with a regional vibe that this time supports UNHCR's work with displaced families in the Arab region. Under the slogan 'One night. One collective voice. One common language. Music', it's certainly a good lineup: 🎙️Marcel Khalif (right) [... more]
The clue is in the name: Expo City's pioneering (and excellent) all-female orchestra take on some of the great arias with "a special guest soprano".
This concert by the UAE National Orchestra and choir puts the emphasis on 'national' with "an evening where we come together in love for the nation, sharing moments of pride and belonging ... a space where we gather as sons [... more]
A regular Mad Cat Comedy night – “Dubai’s wildest comedy show on Saturday” at “the first purpose built comedy room in the country”. The cover charge of AED 99 includes two F&B coupons.
The latest edition of Sharjah Art Foundation's open-call photography exhibition examines the evolving possibilities of documentary photography through newly commissioned works by six artists – Luisa Dörr, Latifa AlBokhari, Sathish Kumar, Adam Rouhana, Guanyu Xu and Maheder Haileselassie. The principle [... more]
An exhibition that brings together works by the Italian artist Marilina Marchica and Emirati artist Salmah Almansoori that are rooted in the landscapes respectively of Sicily and Ghayathi. Marchica traces the imprints of abandoned buildings and domestic spaces through drawing, [... more]
The Mad Cat team does the rather cool Moon Bar at the Sana Restaurant in Mina Al Salam – a great venue: quite intimate, few distractions. Featuring surprise drop-ins, fresh material, and “the kind of intimate room where sitting in the [... more]
Benjamin Lipscomb's 2021 book draws on a recently opened archives and extensive correspondence and interviews with those who knew them best to tell the story of four lifelong friends who met at university and made their mark in a male-dominated [... more]
Sofiane Chalal's hip-hop dance performance XXL addresses the thorny issue of being seen as overweight in society. Rather than hide behind euphemisms and concealment, XXL centres ‘non-standard’ bodies to dismantle pejorative labels and celebrate a journey towards acceptance and recognition. [... more]
An exhibition conceived and curated by Prof Omar Kholeif, featuring Sonia Balassanian, Jai Chuhan, Luísa Correia Pereira, Lalitha Lajmi, Irene Scheinmann and Omar Kholeif himself. Developed from nearly two decades of Kholeif’s research, writing and relationships with artists, the exhibition [... more]
This concert by the UAE National Orchestra and choir puts the emphasis on 'national' with "an evening where we come together in love for the nation, sharing moments of pride and belonging ... a space where we gather as sons [... more]
A joint exhibition by two Syrian artists who explore their homeland's living heritage through abstract painting (Hijazi) and mosaic jewellery (Al Kuzbari) – "a dialogue between memory, tradition, and the present ... heritage as a living presence in contemporary art [... more]
An exhibition born out of the question: how will this time be remembered and who will tell the stories of the people who live here? It's one of the outcomes of Kutubna’s initiative Documenting Culture in the Gulf in a [... more]
Culture Summit Abu Dhabi this year runs 8-10 December under the theme Towards a Reimagined Commons. Bringing together cultural leaders, artists, policymakers and thinkers from around the world, this year's programme explores the role of culture in shaping shared memories, [... more]
The Thai painter Verapat Sitipol explores the relationship between abstraction and the natural world in this body of work; the exhibition considers how we experience nature as something in flux, continuously shaped by movement, memory, and time. Sitipol’s compositions are [... more]
Yoko Ogawa's novel follows a young housekeeper and her son as they form an unlikely bond with a brilliant mathematician whose memory lasts only eighty minutes. It is a quiet, moving story about memory and the connections that shape us. Participants [... more]
Curated by Shafeena Yusuff Ali of the Rizq Art Initiative, this exhibition brings together contemporary ceramics by eight women artists based in the UAE – Nujoom Alghanem, Mirna Bamieh, Moza Al Falasi, Malavika, Parneet Pahwa, Zahra Shafie, Laiba Sherin, and [... more]
Major works by Shahana Rajani, the recipient of the inaugural South Asian Video Art Production Grant, Rohini Devasher, and Sarker Protick that examine how land, water, and the cosmos serve as living archives of memory and history. Through photography, moving [... more]
A Christmas present from Cinema Space – possibly the best film version of Dickens' novel, and it's free. Ebenezer Scrooge (Michael Caine, obviously having a lot of fun) is visited on Christmas Eve by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, [... more]
Capra's classic snow-laden tearjerker (five Oscar nominations) has James Stewart as a struggling banker (!) who becomes so disillusioned with his small-town life that he contemplates suicide. Fortunately his trainee guardian angel, Clarence (Henry Travers), is able to intervene and [... more]
A creative session connecting visual art with storytelling: participants explore selected artworks from the Foundation and imagine that each one is the cover or opening scene of a book waiting to be written – with an invented title and a [... more]
The final exhibition in the series The importance of staying quiet, "an attempt to acknowledge a minimal vocabulary within Pakistani art", focuses on conceptual and material practices shaped by stillness and abstraction.
A solo show for the Palestinian artist Wadeei Khaled that considers the family as the foundation through which we understand ourselves, our histories and our connection to place. "His paintings transform everyday gestures of love and care into a visual [... more]
Ayyam’s 20th-anniversary exhibition seeks to honour a journey defined by continuity, resilience, and artistic exchange, says the gallery; and, "much like the gallery’s programming, the exhibition is conceived as a visceral experience, a story that has withstood the test of [... more]
Curated by Nada Shabout of NYUAD's al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, this exhibition investigates and celebrates the work and influence of one of the most important art movement of the mid-Century Middle East. Dr Shabout brings [... more]
Safekeeping Stories, by UAE-based Indian artist and graphic designer Hannan Arshad, was the winner of the 2025 Award. A poignant response to cultural loss, and a compelling example of how historical narratives can be reimagined through contemporary public art, the [... more]
Malik Thomas Jalil Kydd’s second solo exhibition marks a significant evolution in his practice, says the gallery – "one in which desire and divinity are intertwined and rendered in quiet persistence". Previous works often situated their subjects within expansive landscapes, [... more]
The first institutional solo exhibition by Emirati artist Juma Alhaj is the culmination of his participation in 421 Arts Campus' Artistic Development Program. Grounded in reading, journaling, and philosophical inquiry, it explores themes of reflection, solitude, and self-discovery; the exhibition [... more]
A group show curated by Deniz Kirkali and Elham Puriya Mehr that brings together works in video, sound installations, and performance that explore “alternative infrastructures for knowledge-making such as whispers, murmurs, hums, gossip, and storytelling”. The artists include Aliaskar Abarkas, [... more]
The Ghanain artist’s second solo exhibition with Efie Gallery extends Owusu’s longstanding exploration of value, currency, and the social structures through which worth is assigned and perceived; it features textured canvases, mixed media sculptures, and – for the first time [... more]
Rend Beiruti’s research display, sharing insights into her investigation of the baqala neighbourhood grocery store as a vital urban entity in Dubai, exploring its history, its influence on urban development, and its role as a cultural signal. Through photographs, mapping, [... more]
Bringing together personal histories and material experimentation, this exhibition – the first in the UAE by the Brazilian artist – reflects on growth, rupture and renewal, revealing how fragments of the past can take root in unexpected ways. With new [... more]
A group exhibition of newly commissioned and recent works by Rajni Perera, Sancintya Mohini Simpson, Soma Surovi Jannat, Karan Shrestha and Rain Wu, five artists who offer different perspectives on our relationship with place. Says the gallery: "The Territory Dreams [... more]
Reynier Llanes’ second solo exhibition at Firetti Contemporary includes works from The Tourist and The Poet series plus the debut of Bodega, a new series in which the human figure gives way to transparent vessels overflowing with flowers. "Moving between [... more]
A solo show for the French abstract painter whose work melds the aesthetics of Western art – line, action and abstraction – with the principles of traditional Eastern art, such as unity, spontaneity and asceticism. Verdier paints vertically using giant [... more]
A landmark retrospective for one of the key modernist painters to emerge from the Levant in the twentieth century. Alongside significant works drawn primarily from the artist’s estate, many travelling outside Lebanon for the very first time, the exhibition – [... more]
An exhibition that brings contemporary UAE-based artist Lana Khayat into dialogue with Lebanese modernists Etel Adnan and Helen Khal, linking distinct practices across generations of Lebanese artists. Says the gallery: "Their work differs in scale and sensibility, yet each built [... more]
A selection of work by a pioneering figure of modern sculpture in Lebanon, presented in collaboration with the Alfred Basbous Foundation. Basbous worked across stone, marble, wood and bronze, responding closely to the particular qualities of each material rather than [... more]
Marking her first solo exhibition in the UAE, Lulua Alyahya's Artist's Room brings together new commissions, loans and works from the Art Jameel Collection. Through her paintings, Alyahya explores culturally embedded archetypes with tenderness, humour and a critical inflection, often [... more]
Dawood's New Dream Machine Project centres on a 3m-high rotating and flickering light sculpture, an homage to artist and writer Brion Gysin's Dreamachine; driving the mechanism is a perforated cylinder emitting pulses of light at the frequency of the brain's [... more]
This Artist's Room traces forty years of Walid Siti's practice, including new sculptural commissions and material from the artist's studio. Across his body of work, structural forms mirror geological formations, rising summits, Mesopotamian ziggurats, and the Tower of Babel, all [... more]
This spectacular exhibition follows a thousand years of maritime history and culture, charting the routes that connected the civilisations of Africa, Asia, and beyond. It documents the evolution of navigation and the techniques that enabled adventurous sailors to explore the [... more]
A group show curated by Eugenia Kikodze, this exhibition brings together a multigenerational group of artists from across the Arab world and Eastern Europe, bound by a shared interest in metaphysics and its representation within art. The artists include Zaha [... more]
Bringing together paintings, archival photographs, sketches and ephemera produced after 2018, this exhibition promises an immersive encounter with Salah Elmur’s world – "where memory, landscape and identity merge and ripple through time", exploring the artist’s shifting sense of belonging and [... more]
Bringing together paintings, archival photographs, sketches and ephemera produced after 2018, this exhibition offers an immersive encounter with Salah Elmur’s world, "one where memory, landscape and identity merge and ripple through time" as the Jameel puts it.
Following showings in Paris, Lyon, Seoul and Shanghai, this exhibition – "a strategic research project for L'ÉCOLE, at the crossroads of archaeology and the history of techniques, and goldsmithing craftsmanship" – demonstrates the skills and techniques in reproducing a Celtic [... more]
Bani Abidi’s Artist’s Room displays a single body of work, Trembling hands (2024) – a series of portraits of artists, journalists, politicians, lawyers, doctors and civil society leaders who publicly spoke out against the genocide of Palestinians, often using public platforms [... more]
Afrah Shafiq’s Nobody Knows for Certain is a multimedia game that draws on the illustrated children’s books that were distributed widely in India by the USSR, highlighting a little-known chapter of Cold War-era cultural exchange. These richly illustrated Soviet fairytales [... more]
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