Art & Culture

The Best Art Exhibitions in Dubai to Visit This Winter

BYMille Team

December 10, 2025

Trust me, we get it. Recommending indoor things to do during the brief window when Dubai is actually walkable feels… counterintuitive at best. But hear us out. This is peak art season, when every gallery, museum, and creative space quietly decides to drop its strongest lineup of the year. And if you’re going to spend time inside, it might as well be somewhere inspiring. Below, a non-exhaustive (but still comprehensive) list of art exhibitions in Dubai you don’t want to miss this winter.

By The Movement of All Things at Lawrie Shabibi
Running until January 6, 2026

By the Movement of All Things. Courtesy Lawrie Shabibi.

Curated by Hamzeh Alfarahneh at Lawrie Shabibi in Alserkal Avenue, this group exhibition brings together abstract works from an international roster— including Igshaan Adams, Hamra Abbas, Diana Al-Hadid, James Webb, Bronwyn Katz, Timo Nasseri and Moshekwa Langa— in a thoughtful exploration of movement, gesture and memory. Rather than offering easy interpretation, the show uses abstraction as a living language that reflects embodied experience, ancestral knowledge, and the traces of motion through time and space. Inspired by the poet and former President of the Regional Council of Martinique
Aimé Césaire’s writing, the exhibition invites visitors to slow down, engage curious through their own lens, and consider how lines between South African and Middle Eastern non-figurative practices resonate in conversation.

Ali Kaaf: The Fire’s Edge at Ayyam Gallery
Running until January 10, 2026

Ali Kaaf, The Fire’s Edge. Courtesy Ayyam Gallery.

This is Berlin-based Syrian artist Ali Kaaf’s first solo show with Ayyam Gallery, bringing together pivotal bodies of work including his Rift, Helmet and Ras Ras series. Through paper, blown glass, fire, ink and charcoal, Kaaf explores the fragile space between creation and destruction— where ancestral practice meets modern erasure— meditating on memory, disappearance, and renewal. His work operates in the tension between density and void, past and present, inviting open interpretation and quiet reflection on endurance and vulnerability.

Daniel Arsham: What Remains at Perrotin
Running until January 10, 2026

Daniel Arsham’s ‘What Remains’ at Perrotin Dubai. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

Daniel Arsham hardly needs an introduction. His fictional-archaeology universe has seeped so deeply into contemporary culture that even people who don’t follow art can spot an Arsham object a mile away. In What Remains, his first solo exhibition in the UAE, Perrotin Dubai brings together sculptures, drawings, paintings, and an immersive sound installation that probe the relationship between memory and time. The show unfolds through copper-wrapped bonsai speakers, labyrinthine architectural forms, and Arsham’s signature “eroded relics,” where icons like a Yankees cap or a Back to the Future DeLorean are reimagined as artefacts of a future past. It’s a contemplative, sensory encounter with the objects that shape collective nostalgia and the traces they leave behind.

Ryan Koopmans & Alice Wexell: The Wild Within at Leila Heller Gallery
Running until January 15, 2026

Beneath the Painted Sky, 2025. Courtesy of Leila Heller Gallery

In a city obsessed with the new, The Wild Within feels like a beautiful contradiction. The ongoing series by Ryan Koopmans and Alice Wexell begins with real photographs of abandoned buildings around the world— Soviet-era sanatoriums, forgotten palaces, derelict hotels— before the artists digitally reanimate them with swaying foliage, shifting light and slow-breathing movement. What emerges are surreal, semi-alive spaces that sit somewhere between memory and dreamscape: architecture on the brink of disappearing, revived by nature’s quiet insistence. The works aren’t nostalgic as much as they are contemplative. They ask what happens to the places we leave behind, and who or what carries their stories forward. In Dubai, where constant reinvention is almost a civic value, the exhibition serves as a reminder that decay is also a kind of transformation, and that beauty exists in the in-between.

Mohammed Joha: Houselessness at Zawyeh Gallery
Running until January 11, 2026

Houseless No. 7 (2025). Courtesy of Mohammed Joha

Some artists work with paint; Mohammed Joha works with what remains. In Houselessness, the Palestinian artist gathers scraps of fabric, cardboard, paper, plastic, and even torn pieces of his own clothing and fits them together the way someone might rebuild a memory after it’s been broken. The fragments feel like they’ve lived entire lives before landing on his canvas: pieces of rooms that no longer stand, colors that survived explosions, textures that once belonged to ordinary days. In this exhibition, collage becomes its own language, and a way of reconstructing what violence erases. Joha distinguishes between houselessness and homelessness—“We are without houses, not without a home. Our homeland is Palestine.” That idea pulses through each work, where muted greys echo polluted skies and the psychic heaviness of occupation, while sudden flashes of cobalt, yellow, pink, and lace appear like memories refusing to disappear.

The Best Art Exhibitions in Dubai to Visit This Winter

By The Movement of All Things at Lawrie Shabibi
Running until January 6, 2026

Ali Kaaf: The Fire’s Edge at Ayyam Gallery
Running until January 10, 2026

Daniel Arsham: What Remains at Perrotin
Running until January 10, 2026

Ryan Koopmans & Alice Wexell: The Wild Within at Leila Heller Gallery
Running until January 15, 2026

Mohammed Joha: Houselessness at Zawyeh Gallery
Running until January 11, 2026

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The Best Art Exhibitions in Dubai to Visit This Winter

By The Movement of All Things at Lawrie Shabibi Running until January 6, 2026

Ali Kaaf: The Fire’s Edge at Ayyam Gallery Running until January 10, 2026

Daniel Arsham: What Remains at Perrotin Running until January 10, 2026

Ryan Koopmans & Alice Wexell: The Wild Within at Leila Heller Gallery Running until January 15, 2026

Mohammed Joha: Houselessness at Zawyeh Gallery Running until January 11, 2026

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By The Movement of All Things at Lawrie Shabibi
Running until January 6, 2026

Ali Kaaf: The Fire’s Edge at Ayyam Gallery
Running until January 10, 2026

Daniel Arsham: What Remains at Perrotin
Running until January 10, 2026

Ryan Koopmans & Alice Wexell: The Wild Within at Leila Heller Gallery
Running until January 15, 2026

Mohammed Joha: Houselessness at Zawyeh Gallery
Running until January 11, 2026