Dubai’s Best Current & Upcoming Art Exhibitions

Ahead of Art Dubai 2024 in March, in a truly cosmopolitan city that has developed an international pull for artists and aficionados alike, galleries across Dubai continue to showcase the best in global art and cultural exhibitions. With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of some of the best current and upcoming exhibitions fighting for a slot in your calendar over the coming days, weeks and months…

Tammam Azzam: Diary

Ayyam Gallery 

Until February 20th

Syrian artist Tammam Azzam explores destruction and reconstruction of images and spaces, in works that play with perspective. Adopting a point of view that is never top-down but consistently frontal, horizontal lines and urban vistas are bisected and interrupted, much like the lines of a window frame. With playful use of colour, he presents images that are devoid of human beings, and yet eerily familiar.

Sheher, Prakriti, Devi

Ishara Art Foundation

Until June 1st

Curated by New Delhi photographer Gauri Gill, this exhibition explores the relationship between environments – both urban and rural – and the sacred. 12 mostly South Asian artists contribute to Gill’s ongoing documentation of urban, rural, domestic, communitarian, public and non-material spaces, whether through devotional drawings or the study of animals’ home-making efforts outside their usual habitats.

Vikram Divecha: Short Circuits

Jameel Arts Centre

Until June 16th

Beirut-born Vikram Divecha moved to Dubai in 2005, and has since become one of the UAE’s most established artists. In this exhibition, curated by Dawn Ross and Lucas Morin, visitors will experience Divecha’s past decade of work, focusing on his investigations of the different social and built systems around us, inspired by planning, construction, demolition and maintenance that shape the cities of the UAE and beyond.

Michele Nastasi: Arabian Transfer

Gulf Photo Plus

Until December 6th

Michele Nastasi’s Arabian Transfer is conceived as a photo diary-cum-journey through six cities of the Arabian Peninsula, after decades of travel and research in Abu Dhabi, Doha, Dubai, Kuwait City, Manama and Riyadh. ‘Arabian Transfer’ locates the ways in which these places embody the contemporary world’s state of transience; of people, cultures, images, capital and goods. 

Sikka Art & Design Festival

Al Shindagha

February 23rd - March 3rd

Hosted in Dubai’s charming and historical Al Fahidi neighbourhood, this festival will host multiple exhibitions and installations, as well as poetry nights, musical performances, workships, and film screenings. The 12th edition of this family-friendly programme is free to attend for all.

Ana Mazzei: How to Disappear

Green Art Gallery

February 27th – April 20th  

‘How to Disappear’ marks the conclusion of Brazilian artist Ana Mazzei's ongoing project ‘Love Scene Crime Scene’, a three-part exhibition series centred around the fictional disappearance of a ballerina. In this latest instalment, the Brazilian artist deepens the enigma by introducing a collection of bronze sculptures - half human, half animal creatures - and oil paintings that place the spectator in the role of investigator. Mazzei is known for the theatricality of her sculptures, installations, and paintings, and often brings the force of fiction into her practice.

Lara Chahine & Reem Falaknaz: Swallow This! - Arab Women & Body Politics

Gulf Photo Plus

March 8th - April 15th

Lara Chahine and Reem Falaknaz subvert a common documentary landscape in ‘Swallow This!’ with works in photography and digital media. The exhibition explores the rampant pathologization of women’s bodies, where the politically absurd, visually surreal, and humorous converge. Drawing on the uncanny collective experience of womanhood, ‘Swallow This!’ weaves narratives where the clinical or scientific, the grotesque or bodily, the divine or occult coexist as contemporary reflections on post-internet, Arab feminism. Both photographers seek to unpack “erotic capital” where the strange is made familiar, and the familiar, strange.