Art & Culture

The Art Exhibitions in the UAE Worth Leaving the House For

BYMille Team

April 14, 2026

With the UAE still basking in that rare sweet spot of breezy evenings, tolerable afternoons, and just enough sun to romanticize your life, the timing couldn’t be better to step back into the city’s galleries. And with a fragile ceasefire between the United States, Israel, and Iran tentatively holding after weeks of escalation, the region feels, at least momentarily, like it’s exhaling. It’s in this in-between that art tends to hit differently. Across Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and beyond, exhibitions are offering exactly what you need right now: somewhere to slow down, look closer, and maybe make sense of things, or at the very least, escape them for an hour or two. Below seven art exhibitions worth leaving the house for this month.

Urdu Worlds at Ishara Art Foundation
Until June 13; Dubai

Curated by Hammad Nasar, Urdu Worlds positions language as a living, breathing architecture of memory, identity, and belonging. The exhibition brings together the powerful works of Zarina and Ali Kazim in a dialogue that moves between script and landscape, poetry and place. While Zarina turns to Urdu’s proverbs and vocabulary as a way of mapping home—particularly through displacement—Kazim grounds his practice in physical terrain, tracing the layered histories embedded within land itself. The result is a show that feels both deeply personal and expansively political, probing how language can shape entire worlds while also being used to define who belongs within them.

Get Well Soon at Carbon 12
Until May 25; Dubai

This exhibition sees Nigerian-American artist Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola take something as culturally loaded—and often overlooked—as the durag, and rework it into something unexpectedly delicate. Drawing from the tradition of floral still life painting, Akinbola quite literally builds his “flowers” through layered fabrics, seams, and folds, sidestepping illusion in favor of construction. The result sits somewhere between painting, sculpture, and personal archive, where questions of identity, material, and memory quietly collide. Elsewhere, recurring brick motifs introduce a more grounded counterpoint, hinting at permanence, legacy, and the idea of home as something both built and inherited. But it’s the exhibition’s more ephemeral gestures—a bouquet of helium balloons slowly sinking over time, a custom scent diffusing then disappearing—that linger the longest.

This Bloom I Borrow, Efie Gallery
Until May 9; Dubai

At Efie Gallery, Aïda Muluneh pushes her already unmistakable visual language into new, more tactile territory. Known for her striking, hyper-composed photographic portraits, the Ethiopian artist expands her practice here, layering silkscreen, hand-painting, and acrylic onto her images to create works that feel as much built as they are captured. Developed during her time in Dubai, the series leans into dualities. Bold, geometric compositions—often centered on African women—are punctuated with recurring symbols and saturated color, but resist easy interpretation, instead inviting a slower, more introspective read. The title itself hints at that tension: beauty as something fleeting, borrowed rather than owned.

Picasso: The Figure, Louvre Abu Dhabi
Until May 31; Abu Dhabi

Picasso: The Figure zooms in on what might be the most enduring obsession in Pablo Picasso’s practice: the human body. Drawing largely from the collection of the Musée National Picasso-Paris, the exhibition sidesteps a traditional timeline in favor of something more intuitive, mapping the artist’s shifting approaches to the figure across seven decades. From early Cubist distortions to the exaggerated, almost sculptural bodies of the 1920s, and later into the fractured, restless forms that defined his final years, the show reveals an artist who never quite let go of representation, even when he seemed to dismantle it entirely. Organized around ideas like hybridization, stylization, and petrification, it’s less a retrospective and more a study in obsession.

Time the Destroyer Is Time the Preserver, Sharjah Art Foundation
Until June 7; Sharjah

Bringing together over four decades of work by Jorge Tacla, the show traces how images of destruction in all its forms is processed, remembered, and, at times, distorted. Working against a world increasingly mediated by satellite imagery and distant, disembodied witnessing, the Chilean-born visual artist paints “in negative,” allowing absence to define form and forcing viewers to confront what isn’t immediately visible. Structured across eight chapters, the exhibition connects seemingly disparate moments of catastrophe—from Beirut to Santiago—while quietly dismantling hierarchies of whose suffering is seen, and whose is overlooked.

Move, pause, return at Gallery Isabelle
Until May 28; Dubai

Marking two decades of shaping Dubai’s contemporary art scene, Gallery Isabelle is doing away with the typical anniversary format in favor of something more slow-burning. Move, pause, return unfolds over 20 days, with a new work revealed daily before coming together as a complete exhibition—featuring a cross-generational lineup that includes Hassan Sharif, Mohammed Kazem, Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, Manal Al Dowayan, and Shaikha Al Mazrou, among others. Each piece is accompanied by a short text from an emerging curator or writer from the region, adding a second layer of interpretation that evolves alongside the show itself. Presented both in the gallery and online, the project feels less like a static exhibition and more like an ongoing conversation. Timed to culminate in an April 11 reception and remain on view through late May, it doubles as both a retrospective of sorts and a nod to the community that’s grown around it.

Of Land and Water at Kalba Ice Factory
Until May 31; Sharjah

Set against the raw, coastal landscape of Kalba, Of Land and Water draws from the Sharjah Art Foundation’s own collection, bringing together large-scale works by nine international artists and collectives, each grappling with the shifting boundaries between land, water, and homeland. Inspired by the Malay concept of tanah air—where “land” and “water” merge to define home—the show moves between the poetic and the political, unpacking how nationhood is constructed and contested. Across installations that span geographies and histories, the ambitions of the postcolonial state are placed in tension with the lived realities of displacement, fractured identities, and inherited grief. Fluid yet grounded, expansive yet intimate, Of Land and Water ultimately asks a deceptively simple question: what ties us to a place—and what forces us away from it?

The Art Exhibitions in the UAE Worth Leaving the House For

Urdu Worlds at Ishara Art Foundation
Until June 13; Dubai

Get Well Soon at Carbon 12
Until May 25; Dubai

This Bloom I Borrow, Efie Gallery
Until May 9; Dubai

Picasso: The Figure, Louvre Abu Dhabi
Until May 31; Abu Dhabi

Time the Destroyer Is Time the Preserver, Sharjah Art Foundation
Until June 7; Sharjah

Move, pause, return at Gallery Isabelle
Until May 28; Dubai

Of Land and Water at Kalba Ice Factory
Until May 31; Sharjah

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The Art Exhibitions in the UAE Worth Leaving the House For

Urdu Worlds at Ishara Art Foundation Until June 13; Dubai

Get Well Soon at Carbon 12 Until May 25; Dubai

This Bloom I Borrow, Efie Gallery Until May 9; Dubai

Picasso: The Figure, Louvre Abu Dhabi Until May 31; Abu Dhabi

Time the Destroyer Is Time the Preserver, Sharjah Art Foundation Until June 7; Sharjah

Move, pause, return at Gallery Isabelle Until May 28; Dubai

Of Land and Water at Kalba Ice Factory Until May 31; Sharjah

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Urdu Worlds at Ishara Art Foundation
Until June 13; Dubai

Get Well Soon at Carbon 12
Until May 25; Dubai

This Bloom I Borrow, Efie Gallery
Until May 9; Dubai

Picasso: The Figure, Louvre Abu Dhabi
Until May 31; Abu Dhabi

Time the Destroyer Is Time the Preserver, Sharjah Art Foundation
Until June 7; Sharjah

Move, pause, return at Gallery Isabelle
Until May 28; Dubai

Of Land and Water at Kalba Ice Factory
Until May 31; Sharjah