UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
At The Third Line, From the Perspective of Language (from 4 Mar – 7 Apr 2026) marks Sara Naim’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery and her first public presentation of paintings. Produced between 2023 and 2026, the large-scale canvases move deliberately between figuration and abstraction, staging symbolically charged imagery at the threshold of legibility. A new video performance, Mother Practices Her Tongue (2026), accompanies the paintings, abstracting Arabic into gesture and sound detached from communicative function. Across surface, body, and voice, the exhibition observes how systems of language persist not as stable structures but as sites where meaning is continuously constructed, imposed, and unsettled. During the opening on the 4th of March, A conversation will take place at 8.30 PM (GMT+4) between independent arts writer, researcher, and curator Nadine Khalil and the artist to discuss Naim’s multidisciplinary approach vis a vis the new pieces shown in the exhibition.
Tashkeel announces the 2026 cohort of its Tanween Design Programme. Seven designers begin an eleven-month process of research and material experimentation rooted in local production networks, culminating in new works to be presented at Downtown Design during Dubai Design Week (from 4 Nov – 8 Nov 2026). The initiative frames design not simply as object-making but as an evolving methodology grounded in place, collaboration, and material knowledge.
Elsewhere, deep time enters the present at Sharjah Archaeology Museum, where the travelling exhibition Shaped by Stones: The Tools that Made Prehistoric Qatar (until 30 Apr 2026) assembles more than 110 artefacts from Qatar’s Stone Age. Developed by the Archaeology Department together with the Museography and Heritage Museums Development team at Qatar Museums, the display brings together flint implements, funerary artefacts, and archaeological finds to explore how early communities adapted to their surroundings through making, survival practices, and mobility across the terrain. The exhibition is grounded by the pioneering research of archeologist Holger Kapel whose book Atlas of Stone Age Cultures in Qatar is instrumental to understanding prehistoric era of the region. Presented publicly for the first time, objects from pre-Islamic human and camel burials in Qatar are shown alongside artefacts from Mleiha, framing them not as isolated relics but as carriers of ongoing cultural connection.
LEBANON
At Sursock Museum, Becoming Icon (until 20 Jun 2027), curated by Yasmine Chemali, examines how artworks acquire authority within collective memory through processes of visibility, circulation, and institutional framing. Chemali, an art historian trained at the École du Louvre and former head of modern and contemporary collections at the museum approaches iconicity not as a fixed status but as a condition produced over time. Drawing from the museum’s holdings alongside key loans, the exhibition brings together works that have persisted, shifted, or re-emerged across historical contexts. Paintings by Etel Adnan condense landscape into luminous planes of colour; Shafic Abboud’s abstractions unfold through gestural chromatic fields; and Rafic Charaf suspends symbolic figures within charged pictorial space. Across these works, identity figures, sites of memory, and recurring visual forms operate as points where meaning accumulates and is contested. Organised through conceptual markers such as form, symbol, and community, the exhibition considers iconisation as an active and political process one shaped as much by reception and repetition as by the image itself.
QATAR
At the Fire Station, British contemporary visual artist Haroon Mirza, of Pakistani descent, presents Everything Was, Is and Always Will Be (from 5 Feb – 31 May 2026), his first institutional solo in the GCC. The exhibition engages sound, light, and energy systems to explore perception, ritual, and cosmology. In Gallery 3, Musica Universalis (Dyson Sphere 03) (2026) converts artificial light into a vibrating sonic ecosystem, while in the Tower, Miraj Al Shams (2026) activates at sunset, translating solar energy into choreographed sound and light. Earlier, Mirza’s live performance, Adam, Eve, Others and UFO in the Age of LLM’s, extended these experiments temporally, with performers enacting electronic signals at 111 Hz, a frequency historically linked to spiritual resonance. Across installations and performance, Mirza positions the viewer within a field where technology, converged with ritual.
KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA
At Athr Gallery in AlUla, Intimate Architectures of Belonging (until 2 May 2026) presents a new body of work by Sara Abdu. The Saudi sculpture and installation artist has been known to root her work in an attentiveness to the domestic and the overlooked, often using humble materials to uncover latent emotional and cultural resonances. The exhibition unfolds as a meditation on home and memory with an emphasis on their thresholds. The work strikes quietly.
She explores belonging through materials drawn from domestic life, translating scent, texture, and surface into forms that occupy both physical and psychic space. Fragile tiles of compressed henna form surfaces that resist inhabitation. Pixel-like fragments of bukhoor scatter across the floor, evoking dispersed memory and the slow accumulation of daily rituals. Across these reconfigured thresholds, familiar objects are transformed into carriers of presence. Abdu’s work leaves questions open, tracing the contours of memory. The viewers really feel what lingers.
THE WORLD
Across the international art scene this week, exhibitions extend conversations about how material and history intersect in ways that reward close looking. At Lilia Ben Salah Gallery, Resonances — Modern Echoes, Contemporary Gestures (from 17 Feb – 14 Mar 2026) brings together small-format works by artists across generations whose practices engage gesture, material, and form. Chaïbia Talal’s expressive fields of colour, Inji Efflatoun’s dynamic figuration, and Georges Koskas’s linear compositions stand alongside contemporary works by Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Farah Khelil, and others; the exhibition privileges adjacency over periodisation, allowing works to enter into quiet dialogue through scale, surface, and touch. Close looking becomes the primary mode of engagement, as each piece reveals continuities of material presence beyond chronological markers.
Meanwhile, at Comptoir des Mines Galerie, After the Fire (extended until 8 Mar 2026) presents recent work by Khadija Jayi, a Moroccan contemporary artist whose practice examines the body, material process, and structures of social perception. In this exhibition, Jayi uses fire and combustion as active processes of transformation, incorporating burned paper, ash, charred surfaces, and mixed media into compositions in which the effects of heat and residue become legible as formal elements. Works combine scorched textures with materials like nails, fibres, and adhesive, creating panels where the history of combustion is visible in the work’s surface. Photographic pieces documenting the effects of fire frame shifts in light and form, recording how material changes after exposure to burning. Across all works, After the Fire treats material alteration as a record of change.
