The year has been strong for the local art scene, with a steady run of thoughtful and well-curated exhibitions.
As 2025 draws to a close and prompts reflection, here are 10 of the most memorable exhibitions, from those that underscored the urgency of art in the face of cultural erasure to those that traced new connections in the region’s art history.
Vestiges at Ayyam Gallery
Iraqi-Dutch artist Athar Jaber marked his first solo exhibition in Dubai earlier this year, with a series of stone sculptures that bear the weight of the modern world.
The busts show human faces with features that have been pummeled in or twisted out of place. Limbs, torsos and heads emerge with Hellenistic grace and detail from marble blocks that have otherwise been left coarse and unfinished. The body parts in Jaber’s sculptures are severed, almost writhing.
The sculptures in Vestiges were not new, with some having been produced in 2014. However, their themes and concerns within the works remain topical.
Jaber created the works after witnessing from afar the turmoil that has affected Iraq and the wider Middle East. It left an indelible mark on his perception of the world – a mark he sought to transpose in stone.
“People are sometimes disturbed or shocked by my work,” he told The National in March. “But then look at what we have been fed through the media. Seeing what we've seen, I can't make beautiful things that just embellish and adorn.”
The exhibition concluded in April
Layered Medium at Manarat Al Saadiyat
Layered Medium: We are in Open Circuits examined the beginnings of the contemporary art movement in South Korea in the mid-20th century, charting its development until the present day.
It was the first major showcase of Korean contemporary art in the Gulf and comes as the inaugural project of a three-year collaboration between Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation (Admaf) and Seoul Museum of Art (Sema).
The exhibition brought together works by more than two dozen South Korean artists, from pioneers including Nam June Paik and Park Hyunki to renowned contemporary figures such as Lee Bul, Haegue Yang and Moka Lee. Layered Medium was not intended as a comprehensive survey of contemporary South Korean art, but it still presented a healthy breadth of works that showed the diversity of practices that shaped the country’s avant-garde scene.
The exhibition concluded in June
Nadia Saikali and Her Contemporaries at Maraya Art Centre
Nadia Saikali and Her Contemporaries was organised in collaboration with Maraya Art Centre and Barjeel Art Foundation. The show shone a long-overdue light on Saikali, a Lebanese artist born in 1936. It brought together artworks from the 1960s that demonstrated the artist’s striking range.
The exhibition also used Saikali’s work as a point of departure to explore how, in the latter half of the 20th century, Beirut was a hub for several female Arab artists, many of whom had a keen sense for abstraction. These include renowned Lebanese figures such as Saloua Raouda Choucair, Huguette Caland, Etel Adnan and Helen Khal, as well as Kuwaiti artist Munira Al-Kazi, Iraqi abstract artist Madiha Umar, Jordanian sculptor Mona Saudi, Syrian painter Asma Fayoumi, and Palestinian mixed-media artist Maliheh Afnan.
As such, the exhibition deftly captured the impact of modern women artists from the region, while also showing how Beirut as a city was instrumental in producing seminal works of Arab abstraction.
The exhibition concluded in July
The Only Way Out is Through: The Twentieth Line at The Third Line
The Only Way Out is Through marks the 20th anniversary of The Third Line, one of Dubai’s first art institutions. The exhibition brings together works by every artist who has been associated with the gallery.
Hayv Kahraman’s enigmatic figures, Farah Al Qasimi’s observant eye and the documentarian sensibilities of Tarek Al-Ghoussein are all represented, as are Huda Lutfi’s wit, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s archival inquiries, and Hassan Hajjaj’s photographs that verge on the sculptural through their exuberant frames.
Rather than haphazardly assembling a myriad collection together in the space, the artworks are chronologically arranged with floor-printed timestamps that spring from hyper-individual and city-related contexts to transformative global moments. As such, the exhibition is an opportunity to reflect just how much has changed in Dubai since 2005, as well as the development of its cultural sector.
The exhibition is running until December 28
Seas are sweet, fish tears are salty at Jameel Arts Centre
Mohammad Alfaraj's solo exhibition at Jameel Arts Centre is abundant with social and anecdotal snippets, specific to daily life in Saudi Arabia’s Al Ahsa.
The governorate is home to the largest oasis in the world. A Unesco World Heritage Site, the oasis is replete with natural springs and date palm groves. Its fertile soil and rich ecology have sustained human settlements for centuries. But Al Ahsa is also full of contradictions. The area contains some of the world’s largest oilfields, propelling a formidable engineering sector as well as an industrial counterpoint to its natural attractions.
Alfaraj trawls from these contradictions a rich set of works. He doesn’t rely on any one craft or medium to evoke Al Ahsa in Dubai. His practice is storytelling, and he resorts to whatever medium best tells the story he is focusing on, whether photographs hanging by strings from the ceiling, video projected on to a mound of sand or a story scrawled on lined notebook paper.
The title is a bit of a key to both the exhibition as well as Alfaraj’s practice, alluding to the playfulness with which he approaches his craft.
“The title was very important to me. It came from a childlike place,” the artist told The National in August. “A child drinks water at home and finds it sweet. One day, they drink seawater and it’s salty. Then they realise that tears are also salty. They wonder why the sea is salty and imagine: do fish cry all the time? The exhibition title is meant to bring back that sense of wonder and emotional empathy – towards people, animals, anything alive.”
The exhibition is running until January 4
Sila: All That is Left to You at Maraya Art Centre
Sila: All That is Left to You brings historical examples of tatreez alongside its contemporary interpretations.
The exhibition at Maraya Art Centre showcases the history and politics of Palestinian embroidery, raising questions about the necessity of art in the face of cultural erasure. The possibilities of tatreez are also expanded. There are video installations, furniture pieces, paintings, textiles as well as embroidered canvases, all of which evoke thought-provoking facets of tatreez, showing how the embroidery is not merely decorative. Every pattern reflects upon specific regional heritage as well as individual expression.
The exhibition is significant for not only spotlighting a traditional Palestinian art form, but also as a reminder of lives that are fighting erasure in the face of the Israeli onslaught of Gaza, which is still continuing despite the ceasefire.
The exhibition is running until January 5
Ala Younis: Past of a Temporal Universe at NYUAD Gallery
The individual components in Ala Younis’s works are small – tin soldiers, dioramas, archival documents – but the way they come together, as a constellation of stories threading personal, societal and historical narratives, is monumental.
The Kuwaiti-born Jordanian artist is being featured in a solo exhibition at the New York University Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, and brings together two decades of work that can be considered a mid-career retrospective.
In her practice, Younis draws from her background as an architect to build sprawling bodies of work that often reference landmark modernist structures as a departure point. From Egypt’s High Dam to the Le Corbusier-designed Baghdad Gymnasium, Younis begins drawing an archival trail, citing films, music, video footage and literature, revealing historical perspectives that alternate between the minute and anecdotal to sweeping points of view ingrained in the region’s collective consciousness.
The exhibition is running until January 18
Two Clouds in the Night Sky at Cultural Foundation
Two Clouds in the Night Sky at Cultural Foundation Abu Dhabi offers a comprehensive survey of the works of one of the UAE’s pioneering figures: Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim.
It bring together works from various mediums. Ibrahim’s totemic sculptures are huddled in the central space. Paintings patterned by forms inspired by the natural environment of his native Khor Fakkan are hung around the sculptures.
A commissioned piece, Time/Place/Void, is an architectural intervention with four colourful interconnected rooms inscribed with Ibrahim’s signature line drawings. The works come together as a surreal “garden”, as Ibrahim calls it, complete with its own ecosystem of trees, insects and lifeforms crafted from papier mache and water bottles.
“I enjoyed seeing the works there,” Ibrahim told The National in November. “As an artist, you only see your works in the studio. But to see them on the walls of the space prompts a dialogue between yourself and your works. This kind of exhibition confirms your relationship with yourself; it confirms your conviction. I don’t need to be encouraged, but it instils a certainty. That certainty is encouraging because, in the end, you are a person who carries within you the genes and the cells of your society, its culture, its language, its vision and all that.”
The exhibition is running until February 22
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.
Rays, Ripples, Residue can be considered as three exhibitions that overlap and inform one another, exploring what it means to create art in the UAE today. 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 trail-blazing moment from the early 2000s to the 2010s. Her Ghosts of Arrival shows works by artists and collectives that 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. Artists included in this section are Charbel-Joseph H Boutros, Khalid Jauffer, Raja'a Khalid, Nima Nabavi and Pratchaya Phinthong.
The exhibition is running until April 26
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. Running until May 31, the exhibition presents large-scale works by nine international artists and collectives.
The artworks show the mercurial nature of borders, the customs and traditions that emerge from transitional zones, or explore the manifold effects of nation-building.
The artworks in the exhibition are monumental in size, and this is what distinguishes Kalba Ice Factory from Sharjah Art Foundation’s other venues. Once a fish feed mill and ice storage facility, the site was previously used for the Sharjah Biennial. Now the foundation aims to use the site for more tailor-made exhibitions, displaying some of the larger works from its own collection. Of Land and Water is the first statement of that mission.
The exhibition is running until May 31
