From surreal seas to silent mountains, the summer programme across Dubai’s galleries brings together artists thinking through fragility, memory, and the absurd. Whether reflecting on performance, migration, or ecological change, these five exhibitions offer distinct yet overlapping views on what it means to endure, imagine, and make sense of the moment. Here’s a closer look at what’s on view.
‘Bubble Land’ at Leila Heller Gallery
Bubble Land by Naeemeh Kazemi transforms the ocean into a surreal theatre of light, distortion, and contradiction. Through hyper-detailed oil paintings, the deep sea becomes a metaphor for modern life, where delight and unease collide.
Clown-like figures, bioluminescent creatures, and swirling bubbles evoke a world both playful and disquieting. Echoing the grotesque masks of Ensor or the melancholy of Picasso’s harlequins, Kazemi’s characters reveal the fragility behind performance. With textures that oscillate between the hyperreal and the dreamlike, each canvas invites the viewer into an immersive space, dense with symbols and emotional complexity, where nothing is simple and nothing is quite what it seems.
Location: Leila Heller Gallery
Date: 15 April till 15 September 2025
‘Garden of Murmurs’ at CARBON 12 Gallery
In Garden of Murmurs, Malik Thomas Jalil Kydd brings together drawing, painting, and fibre across large-scale works that centre the male figure in moments of quiet reflection. Using stitched panels of raw silk, dyed with sage, the artist creates unbounded surfaces where gesture, stain, and texture unfold slowly.
These bodies, scaled just beyond life-size, appear within imagined landscapes that hold both care and loss. Materials such as charcoal, oil, and pastel carry emotional weight, marking time and memory across the fabric. In this space, love is expansive and felt in the act of making, in memory, and in the fragments that remain.
Location: CARBON 12 Gallery
Date: 31 May till 23 August 2025
‘Everyman’s Mountain’ at Lawrie Shabibi Gallery
Everyman’s Mountain marks the first solo exhibition by Emirati artist and designer Omar Al Gurg. Through a series of photographs taken during a six-day ascent of Kilimanjaro in 2021, the artist documents the mountain’s shifting terrains; mist-filled forests, scorched moorlands, and melting glaciers.
The works observe the mountain as both an ecological site and a human one, shaped as much by natural change as by those who traverse it. Pausing often to note light, growth, and atmosphere, Al Gurg draws attention to fragility and scale. The exhibition opens a long-term project tracing Kilimanjaro’s changing landscape through image and memory.
Location: Lawrie Shabibi Gallery
Date: 31 May till 12 September 2025
‘Time Heals, Just Not Quick Enough…’ at Efie Gallery
Time Heals, Just Not Quick Enough…, curated by Ose Ekore, brings together works by Samuel Fosso, Aïda Muluneh, Kelani Abass, Abeer Sultan, and Sumayah Fallatah. Presented at Efie Gallery’s Alserkal Avenue location, the exhibition brings into dialogue photography and film across different generations and geographies.
Fallatah reflects on cultural assimilation and memory through family photographs and video. Sultan engages with marine life, migration, and speculative history. Fosso and Abass consider identity and time through portraiture and print, while Muluneh challenges dominant narratives of African womanhood. The exhibition moves through quiet acts of looking, remembering, and reconfiguring.
Location: Efie Gallery
Date: 1 June till 30 July 2025
‘Tempted by Other Suns’ at Tabari Artspace
Tempted by Other Suns by Béchir Boussandel reflects on movement, marginality, and material transformation through painting, glass, and metal. Raised in France and closely connected to Tunisia, the artist draws on personal and collective histories shaped by migration and survival.
A new body of work in blown glass introduces the figure of the gleaner, those who collect discarded materials to survive. Cast birds and luminous vessels become markers of stalled migration, offering a quiet meditation on aspiration, labour, and the fragility of crossing. This exhibition continues at Tabari Artspace, Dubai, following its first iteration in Tunis.
Location: Tabari Artspace
Date: 3 June till 5 September 2025