During a period regional disruption, local galleries are pressing ahead with numerous exhibitions across the UAE.
Current highlights include Picasso, The Figure at Louvre Abu Dhabi, a focused look at the artist’s reinvention of the human body, and 13 Cents at Foundry in Dubai, where Abdulla Elmaz’s staged photographs chart a movement from anger to vulnerability.
Major institutional shows across Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah continue to take stock of artistic practice in the region – including reflective group exhibitions, landmark solo presentations, photography and landscape-led shows.
Here are 10 exhibitions to see now in the UAE.
1. From the Perspective of Language at The Third Line
Sara Naim’s latest exhibition brings together painting and performance to examine how meaning is constructed through language and images. The London-based Syrian artist moves between figuration and abstraction in a series of large-scale canvases, where fragments of anatomical, botanical and digital imagery are layered across softly shifting colour fields.
Alongside the paintings, the video work Mother Practices Her Tongue reduces speech to its physical components, with repeated sounds breaking down into gesture and noise. Across the exhibition, Naim questions the stability of both language and visual representation, suggesting that what we perceive is always partial and mediated.
Until April 7; Dubai
2. Rays, Ripples, Residue at 421 Arts Campus
This exhibition marks the 10th anniversary of 421 Arts Campus, offering an opportunity to reflect on the practices that have emerged in this time, while also looking towards the future.
The works displayed in Rays, Ripples, Residue are diverse, encompassing video, performance, installations and multimedia. The works promote discussions on “what it means to produce art in the UAE today”, the exhibition literature reads, highlighting perspectives of emerging creatives, collectives and grassroots initiatives, while also nodding to the role of cultural institutions that have promoted these practices.
Rays, Ripples, Residue can be considered as three exhibitions that overlap and inform one another.
Munira Al Sayegh’s Leading to the Middle, for instance, celebrates the contributions of key instigators, from Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim to Lamya Gargash, Khaled Esguerra and Bait15, showing how their works have had a ripple effect on the local arts scene.
Where Al Sayegh unpacks a seminal moment in the earlier moment of the country’s contemporary arts landscape, Nadine Khalil considers what it was like to enter the scene after this trailblazing moment from the early 2000s to the 2010s. Her Ghosts of Arrival shows, as the exhibition literature reads, “the quieter structures that continue to shape the present”. Artists and collectives featured here include Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Mona Ayyash, Nadine Ghandour, Bait Juma, Hashel Lamki, Sara Naim and Isaac Sullivan.
Finally, Murtaza Vali’s SUN™ takes its cue from the sun, not only as a source of life, but also through the way it governs rhythms of daily routine. Symbolically, it reflects “the growing complexity and maturity of artistic practice and discourse in the UAE”, reads the literature. “The diverse conceptual, material and process-based approaches on display are pitched between the sun’s eternal beauty and increasingly urgent critiques of consumption and climate change, revealing the contradictions embedded in narratives of modernity and progress.”
Artists included in this section are Charbel-Joseph H Boutros, Khalid Jauffer, Raja'a Khalid, Nima Nabavi and Pratchaya Phinthong.
Until April 26; Abu Dhabi
3. Image Keepers at Photography Gallery
The inaugural show at Sharjah Art Foundation's new venue in Al Manakh brings together works by 17 artists and collectives. The photographs are all drawn from the foundation’s collection and encompass studio portraits and multimedia installations.
Highlights include The Bride is Beautiful but She is Married to Another Man, a 2017 portrait series by Rula Halawani that depicts Palestinians just before the checks at the border crossing. Sunil Gupta’s Black Experience delves into the everyday lives of South Asian communities in the UK in the 1980s. Susan Hefuna’s Landscape/Cityscape shows Cairo and the Nile Delta through a pinhole camera. Mohammed Kazem’s Window shows the rapid urban development in the UAE, documenting the rise of a new building and the experiences of the workers constructing the structure.
Until April 26; Sharjah
4. Hard Like Tears, Soft Like Glass at MiZa
Iris Projects is organising the first solo exhibition by Shamsa Al Omaira, a multidisciplinary artist and designer based in Abu Dhabi.
Hosted at MiZa at Port Zayed, the exhibition focuses on Al Omaira’s exploration of duality, drawing on images of childhood comfort and security. Familiar references such as bedding and jello desserts are reimagined as soft-looking sculptural works embedded with elements of risk, including ceramic and glass shards.
The show is presented as part of Iris's wider programme and follows a year-long mentorship with curator and art critic Nadine Khalil. The process supported the development of Al Omaira’s practice and encouraged experimentation with new materials and formats, including woodwork, stitching and installation-based works.
Until April 30; Abu Dhabi
5. 13 Cents at Foundry
Australian photographer Abdulla Elmaz’s debut solo exhibition brings together 24 staged photographs that trace a movement from anger and rupture towards vulnerability and acceptance.
Developed over four years, the works unfold as single-image narratives shaped by personal and professional conflict, with recurring motifs of suspended cars, fractured homes, red-drenched figures and carefully constructed cinematic sets.
The exhibition also reflects Elmaz’s insistence on photography as a handmade, authored form, even as digital tools are used selectively in the final image-making process.
Until April 30; Dubai
6. Picasso, The Figure at Louvre Abu Dhabi
Picasso, The Figure offers a focused examination of how Pablo Picasso transformed representations of the human body in modern art.
Drawn largely from the collection of the Musee National Picasso–Paris, the exhibition traces Picasso’s engagement with the figure across seven decades, shaped by formal experimentation, political upheaval and personal experience. It advances a central argument that Picasso remained fundamentally committed to the human figure, even when his work appeared to dismantle representation.
Rather than following a chronological structure, the exhibition is organised around recurring approaches that defined his treatment of the body, including schematisation, hybridisation, petrification and stylisation. These themes chart the evolution of his figures from early Cubist symbols to the monumental bodies of the 1920s, the hybrid forms of Surrealism and the fractured, urgent figures of his later years.
Until May 31; Abu Dhabi
7. Reflections: Modern and Contemporary Art from the Villain Collection at Bassam Freiha Art Foundation
The exhibition draws from the private collection of Abu Dhabi-based patrons Fairouz and Jean-Paul Villain. Organised into three sections, the show brings together modern and contemporary works from across the Arab world, encouraging connections beyond geography and chronology.
The Levant-focused opening explores themes of conflict, displacement and intimacy through artists such as Etel Adnan and Paul Guiragossian. A North African section highlights continuity in artistic traditions, while the final section celebrates Emirati pioneers and contemporary voices, reflecting the collectors’ long-standing ties to Abu Dhabi and the local art scene.
Until May 31; Abu Dhabi
8. Urdu Worlds at Ishara Art Foundation
Urdu Worlds is the UAE’s first contemporary art exhibition dedicated to the Urdu language. Curated by Hammad Nasar, the exhibition stages a visual and conceptual dialogue between the late Indian-American printmaker Zarina and Pakistani artist Ali Kazim.
It marks the first comprehensive presentation of Kazim’s work in the Gulf and brings his practice into conversation with Zarina’s long-standing engagement with language, memory and abstraction.
Although shaped by different generations and geographies, both artists draw deeply on Urdu literature and thought. Zarina frequently incorporated Urdu poetry and text into her prints, while Kazim’s paintings are informed by Urdu fiction and verse, shaping his reflections on landscape, history and everyday life.
Until May 31; Dubai
9. Of Land and Water at Kalba Ice Factory
Of Land and Water marks the first presentation of works from the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection in the emirate's east coast.
The exhibition presents large-scale works by nine international artists and collectives. The works ponder upon how borders sever stretches of open land and sea, dividing inhabitants and impacting their daily lives.
Until May 31; Sharjah
10. Spectra of the Beautiful Past at Bait Sheikh Saeed bin Hamad Al Qasimi
Taking place in the heritage house in Kalba, Sharjah, the exhibition brings together works by prominent Emirati artists including Abdulrahim Salem and Najat Makki. The work on display is meant to evoke nostalgia and an appreciation for a bygone era.
The exhibition’s venue underscores its themes. Constructed at the turn of the 20th century, it was built by and named after the ruler of Kalba, Saeed bin Hamad Al Qasimi.
Until May 31; Sharjah
