Emirati Expressions showcases work by 50 UAE artists at the Emirates Palace this week. As best-of collections go, this one looks to be authoritative. Some of the country's most prominent creative talents are showing, with Faiza Mubarak, Abdul Kader al Rais and Azza al Qubaisi among them. The noted Picasso scholar Anne Baldassari, the director of Paris's Musée National Picasso, curates. She plans to present work in both traditional and modern idioms, from video art to Arabic penmanship, to show the full range of contemporary Emirati culture.
Dubai's Opera Gallery will show Latin Flavour, a survey of art produced in Latin America, this week. Among the 12 artists featured are established names such as Romero Britto and emerging talents such as the Jeddah-based Argentinian collagist Laura Fernandez de Nazir. Particularly enjoyable is Federico Uribe's Dirty Money, a bust of a grim-faced statesman, neatly bearded and bow-tied, pieced together from coins. It's typical of the Colombian conceptualist, who likes to mimic traditional forms using unconvential means. His Portrait I achieves similar painterly effects by glueing together dozens of Puma running shoes. Also on wrongfooting, so to speak, is the Colombian painter Fernando Botero, who achieves a pitch of simmering menace simply by not showing his Abu Ghraib series. These chilling studies of doughy bodies subjected to humiliation and torture put him in the headlines in 2005; now one finds oneself nervously examining his scenes of corpulent bullfighters and housewives with currant-bun faces for some hint of atrocity. Yet even the bull seems to be having a nice time. It's like looking at a Beryl Cook painting and expecting a wave of Cossacks to come sweeping over the horizon.
One of the stars of Carbon 12's youth section, Alireza Massoumi, has been given his own show. The 30-year-old Iranian artist goes in for Philip Guston-ish desert scenes. His scrubby landscapes, both cartoonish and sinister, look poised, stifling their hilarity, ready to spring something on you. That the rug remains eternally unpulled just makes the trick all the neater. The Dubai Shopping Festival though not known for its intellectual delights is hosting a gathering of Hindi and Urdu poets at Dubai's Indian High School at the end of the month with some lighter diversions in the form of the Chinese state Circus, complete with Shaolin Warriors.
Lastly, to Dubai's Ayyam Gallery. Stories from the Levant presents cool, precise work by the estimable Palestinian painter Samia Halaby, whose canvases always seem to suggest microscope slides and optics experiments. In addition, there's knotty collage work from Syria's Tammam Azzam and mad stuff from the multidisciplinary Lebanese artist Nadim Karam, who has designed a sort of floating cloud garden, borne aloft on columns meant to resemble rain. The whole thing has been worked out in stupefying detail; I gather he wants to have it built in Dubai at some stage. Here's hoping they leave out the many-armed puppet-master thing that hovers over it in his 2008 painting, The Conductor and the Cloud.
Emirati Expressions. Tuesday until April 16, Gallery One, Emirates Palace, Abu Dhabi (www.arts abudhabi.com). Latin Flavour: Contemporary Latin American Art. Saturday to Feb 5, Dubai Opera Gallery, Gate Village Building 3, Dubai International Financial Centre, Sheikh Zayed Road, Dubai (04 323 0909, www.operagallery.com). Alireza Massoumi. Tuesday until Feb 20, Carbon 12, Marina View Towers, Marina Drive, Dubai (050 464 4392, carbon12dubai.com).
Stories from the Levant. Thursday until Feb 5, Ayyam Gallery, Alserkal Warehouse Avenue, Street 8, Al Quoz, Dubai (04 3236242, www.ayyamgallery.com). Chinese State Circus. Until Feb 15, Dubai Festival Centre, Sheikh Zayed Rd, Dubai (04 2325444, www.festivalcentre.com).