UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
Across Dubai and Abu Dhabi, exhibitions challenge the ordinary: maps without borders, symbols stripped of certainty, the human form remade, exposing the stories we inherit and those we rewrite.
Using iron, clay, wood, stone, and pigment, Khozema Al-Aaed’s We Walk on Stories maps memory and human presence, rather than geography. The exhibition at Firetti Contemporary in Dubai, running from 13 Feb to 10 May, presents the work of the Dubai-based artist, whose Cities series maps human presence rather than geography. Stripped of names, borders, and fixed routes, these abstract cartographies trace choices, absences, and the paths we leave behind. The show asks viewers not to decode, but to recognise the land as witness and the stories we carry across it.
Building on the theme of how meaning is constructed and reshaped, The Task of the Mythologist at Carbon 12, Dubai, running from 17 Jan – 20 Mar 2026 turns from the landscape to symbols embedded in daily life. Anahita Razmi’s sixth solo exhibition, with an intervention by Peyman Shafieezadeh, examines how modern myths, from a fingers-crossed emoji to a talismanic shirt, shift depending on context. Across media, she deconstructs and recombines these cultural references to expose the unstable systems of value in our material and digital worlds. The show asks viewers to consider how symbols shape thought, power, and collective memory.
Meanwhile in Abu Dhabi, Seen / Scene IV at Rizq Art Gallery, on view until April 15th, 2026, brings together a dynamic group of young UAE artists under Gaith Abdulla’s curation. Featuring a range of voices, including Adele Bea Cipste, Afra Alsuwaidi, and Ahed Alameri, the exhibition continues the series’ focus on experimentation and collective engagement. Seen / Scene IV highlights how emerging artists in Abu Dhabi are reshaping narratives, reconsidering conventions, and asserting presence within both local and global contexts.
Finally, Picasso, the Figure at Louvre Abu Dhabi running from 21 Jan until 31 May 2026 presents a broader historical arc, tracing Pablo Picasso’s lifelong preoccupation with the human form. Featuring works from Musée National Picasso-Paris and regional collections, the exhibition underscores the enduring influence of his practice and its resonance in the Arab world. From early studies to landmark masterpieces, Picasso repeatedly remade the figure, challenging perception, form, and narrative, an echo of the ways contemporary UAE artists are also remaking meaning today.
KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA
In Saudi Arabia, artists have produced original works that are installed publicly, becoming lasting elements of Riyadh’s urban fabric. The 7th edition of the Tuwaiq Sculpture Symposium and Exhibition that opened on January 10th, brings together 25 artists from 18 countries to create large-scale works along Prince Mohammed bin Abdulaziz Street (Tahlia Street) in Riyadh. Curated by Lulwah Alhomoud (Saudi Arabia), Rut Blees Luxemburg (Luxembourg), and Sarah Staton (UK), the event unfolds under the theme Traces of What Will Be, exploring transformation as both a physical process and a metaphor for urban renewal.
Tahlia Street, named after desalination, carries a legacy of innovation: the site of Riyadh’s first desalination plant, it symbolises the city’s ability to convert scarcity into sustenance. Responding to this history, the participating artists work with local stone and reclaimed metal; materials that hold memory and potential to create sculptures that mark the present while imagining the future. The process is public and on view until 22 February, offering visitors a live view of creation, reflection, and exchange, with the works ultimately forming an exhibition at the site itself. The participating artists come from a culturally diverse and impressive spectrum such as Abdulhameed Altukhaes (Saudi Arabia) with his artwork Enriching Life, Azza Alqubaisi (UAE) and her artwork: Between the Lines, elparo (France) and his artwork IN FINITY, and José Miguel Cárcamo (Chile) and his artwork The Alchemy and Transmutation of the Sea.
From monumental metal and stone to fragile, layered paper, the exploration of material and presence continues in Jeddah with Asma Bahmim’s Here, Now (7 Jan – 30 Apr 2026) at Athr Gallery. Jeddah-based artist Asma Bahmim, researcher in miniature and geospatial art and a leading figure in contemporary Saudi visual culture, situates work in a space of unresolved meaning, where emotional density and quiet uncertainty inhabit every surface. Centred on Circle Star from the Nebula series, the exhibition foregrounds that what appears calm carries latent pressure. Drawing from Islamic miniature traditions, Bahmim reconfigures ornament and layered paper to articulate the multiplicity of interior states, reflecting the ways contemporary visual narratives emerge within.
55 x 65 cm. Copyright The Artist.
LEBANON
In Beirut, contemporary practice negotiates the intimate and the elemental, from private interiors to dust-laden architectures, revealing the traces we inhabit and those that inhabit us.
Lebanese painter Annie Kurkdjian presents her solo exhibition Behind Curtains at The LT Gallery, running from 12 to 26 February 2026. Through carefully staged compositions, Kurkdjian’s paintings present a structured exploration of proximity, control, and inner turbulence, articulating how these elements operate within the work and its spatial presence. Viewers this week will be drawn into these in-between states, where the unseen carries a force equal to or greater than what is visible.
From private rooms to the dust underfoot, the work reminds us that art is made of what we leave behind. Lebanese contemporary visual artist Stéphanie Saadé, whose practice is primarily installation-based, uses dust as both medium and measure in The Encounter of the First and Last Particles of Dust at the Sursock Museum (25 July 2025 – 26 April 2026). Each particle marks memory and resists closure, while site-specific interventions, including a full-scale reproduction of her family home’s floor, embroidered partitions, and scattered paper scraps, map entropy with precision.
Additionally this week, Lebanon has revealed its national presentation for the 61st Venice Biennale, announcing Don’t Get Me Wrong as the title of its pavilion project. Conceived by Lebanese-American renowned painter Nabil Nahas and curated by Nada Ghandour, the exhibition will take the form of a large-scale immersive environment exploring the ties between humanity, nature and the wider cosmos. Presented by the Lebanese Visual Art Association under the Ministry of Culture, the pavilion positions Nahas’s decades-long visual research within an experiential format, inviting reflection on interconnectedness, multiplicity and Lebanon’s layered cultural identity through a contemporary artistic language.
QATAR
Art Basel Qatar closed its inaugural edition at M7 and Doha Design District to an exceptional local, regional, and international response, welcoming over 17,000 visitors across VIP and public days. Galleries reported meaningful engagement with new collectors and institutions, particularly from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Europe, leading to sales across all price points. Representatives from more than 85 museums and foundations worldwide attended, positioning the fair as a hub for institutional discovery and global exchange.
Amid the international sweep of Art Basel, Chaile’s Autorretrato brings the eye back to the intimate, where identity is built stroke by stroke, knot by knot. At Mathaf (Museum of Modern Art), Doha, Argentinian artist Gabriel Chaile, whose work spans sculpture and installation, presents Autorretrato (Self-Portrait, 2022), on view until 21 February 2026. Drawing on his Afro-Arab and Indigenous ancestry, Chaile treats hair as a sculptural trace of hybrid identity shaped over centuries of cultural mixing. Clusters of raised forms echo the head of the prehistoric Venus of Willendorf (c. 25,000 BCE), while knots at the front recall Chaile’s own hair, weaving together personal history, ancestry, and cultural memory.
THE WORLD
P21 Gallery, in collaboration with Bab idDeir Art Gallery and Art Zone Palestine, presents To Survive To Witness (12 Feb – 13 March), a solo exhibition by Gaza-based Palestinian artist Marwan Nassar. Created under conditions of war, Nassar’s paintings bear witness to the lived realities of Gaza, capturing grief and fleeting traces of normalcy. The exhibition presents over 40 curated, high-quality, signed limited editions from a larger corpus of more than 300 works preserved by Art Zone Palestine. To Survive To Witness operates as both a visual archive of collective resilience and a testament to the artist’s commitment to documenting life under siege, resisting erasure, and asserting presence through art.
Both on view in the UK, Nassar confronts the immediacy of survival, both insisting that art preserves what might otherwise be lost, while Khalili reconstructs communal pasts.
The Mosaic Rooms in London reopened with a preview of French-Moroccan artist and educator Bouchra Khalili’s Circles and Storytellers. The exhibition presents interconnected works, including The Circle Project (mixed media installation, 2023) and The Public Storyteller (16mm film, 2024), concluding a decade-long investigation into the overlooked history of the Mouvement des Travailleurs Arabes (MTA) and its theatre groups, Al Assifa and Al Halaka. Khalili’s practice explores alternative forms of civic belonging, suggesting new ways communities are imagined and made visible. This exhibition situates her long-term research within the London context, inviting reflection on histories that have been marginalised.