Louvre Abu Dhabi Unveils Its 2026–2027 Season: Four Exhibitions Spanning Antiquity to the Contemporary

Exhibition schedule at a glance

Louvre Abu Dhabi is located in the Saadiyat Cultural District, Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi. The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 – 18:30.

The Saadiyat Island museum announces a year-long programme that moves from ancient board games and Indian Ocean trade routes to conflict-zone heritage preservation and a first-ever GCC–India contemporary art prize.

Louvre Abu Dhabi has unveiled its 2026–2027 season, presenting a year-long programme that spans millennia and continents — from the rich cultural exchanges of the Indian Ocean and efforts to protect cultural heritage to contemporary artistic expression from the GCC and India. Four exhibitions will run consecutively from July 2026 through April 2027, making the season the museum's most sustained thematic statement to date.

The announcement, made on 23 June, frames the programme around what the museum describes as humanity's interconnected histories. The exhibitions move in sequence from material culture and ancient play, through centuries of maritime commerce, to living contemporary practice and the urgent work of heritage conservation in fragile environments — a progression that gives the season an unusual sense of curatorial momentum.

A Board Game Adventure — 18 July 2026 to April 2027

The season opens with A Board Game Adventure, a new exhibition at the Children's Museum that explores the enduring appeal of board games as tools for learning, imagination and social connection across cultures and centuries. Tracing the journeys of iconic games such as chess, carrom, ludo and mancala, the show reveals how they travelled, evolved and connected societies over time. Around 30 objects from Louvre Abu Dhabi's collection are presented alongside regional and international loans, including early examples from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.

The exhibition is curated by Amine Kharchach, Interpretation and Creative Content Section Head at Louvre Abu Dhabi, and Orlane Lefeuvre, Interpretation and Creative Content Officer. Running for nearly a full year, it functions as a long-term installation rather than a conventional temporary show — an unusual structural choice that signals how seriously the museum is taking its family audience. The premise is deceptively simple: games as a form of cultural transmission. The objects on display — some of them millennia old — quietly make the case that play is not peripheral to civilisation but fundamental to it.

Spices and Wonders: Sailing the Indian Ocean — 14 October 2026 to 14 February 2027

Spices and Wonders: Sailing the Indian Ocean, organised in partnership with the National Museum of Asian Arts – Guimet in France, examines the vast maritime routes that linked ancient societies from Africa, the Middle East and Europe to South and Southeast Asia. Spanning from Antiquity to the 17th century, the exhibition explores centuries of trade, movement and cultural exchange through displays of spices, textiles, ceramics and other goods that crossed the ocean.

The show is co-curated by Dr Guilhem André, Director of Scientific, Curatorial and Collections Management at Louvre Abu Dhabi, and Dr Claire Déléry, Curator of Chinese Ceramics at the Guimet in Paris, with support from Andrea Rozsavolgyi, Lucie Chopard and Fakhera Alkindi. A touring edition will be presented at the Guimet in Paris from 12 May to 6 September 2027, making this effectively a co-production between two of the region's most significant institutional partners.

The Indian Ocean has long been under-represented in the grand narratives of global trade history, which has tended to privilege Atlantic and overland Silk Road routes. An exhibition of this scope — drawing on the collections of both institutions — has the potential to reframe that conversation significantly. For the Gulf, a region shaped by centuries of maritime commerce, the subject matter carries particular local resonance.

Art Here 2026 and the Richard Mille Art Prize — 11 November 2026 to 28 February 2027

The sixth edition of Art Here marks a significant geographic expansion. For the first time, India has been included in the annual exhibition, alongside artists from the GCC. The edition is curated by Kamini Sawhney, founding director of the Museum of Art and Photography in Bengaluru. Its theme, Confluences, reflects on how intertwined histories, cultures and migrations — particularly across the Indian Ocean — continue to shape identities, communities and everyday life.

The exhibition unfolds under Jean Nouvel's dome and across outdoor sites in dialogue with the architecture. Sawhney's theme foregrounds intertwined histories — from navigation and astronomy to algebra and the introduction of zero — and artists will respond to light, water and movement on site, with large-scale experiments in sound, light and spatial installation encouraging audience engagement.

The 2026 Richard Mille Art Prize will recognise one of the selected artists with a grand prize of US $60,000, with the winner to be announced in December 2026. The inclusion of Indian artists is not incidental: it creates a thematic bridge between Art Here and Spices and Wonders, anchoring the entire season's focus on Indian Ocean exchange in both historical and contemporary registers simultaneously.

Living Legacies. Protecting Heritage. Building Hope — 23 November 2026 to 25 April 2027

The final exhibition in the season is organised by Louvre Abu Dhabi and ALIPH — the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage — to mark the foundation's tenth anniversary. Living Legacies tells the stories of people working to protect, restore and safeguard cultural heritage in some of the world's most complex environments. Featuring artefacts on loan from diverse international cultural institutions and ALIPH's grantee partners, the exhibition guides visitors through a multi-sensory, immersive experience with projections and testimonies.

The show is curated by Magdalena Ruiz, Senior Curator at Louvre Abu Dhabi, alongside Dr Sandra Bialystok and Dr Bastien Varoutsikos from the ALIPH Foundation, with support from Amaryllis Maria Georges. The subject — heritage protection in conflict and crisis zones — is one that the region knows well, given ongoing losses across Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Libya. The institutional framing through ALIPH lends the exhibition credibility without reducing it to advocacy; the presence of actual objects salvaged or documented through ALIPH's programmes is what will determine how affecting the show actually becomes.

Contextual programming

Alongside the exhibitions, the museum will host curator-led talks, a symposium, film screenings, performances and workshops. Each exhibition will be accompanied by a trilingual catalogue, specialised guided tours, a podcast episode and weekly workshops for adults. Established initiatives such as Book and Easel, Drawing at the Museum, the Quantum Dome Project and Art in Scents will continue, while visitors can also experience We Are Not Alone, an audio tour beneath the dome created in collaboration with international artists and available in multiple languages.

What this season signals

Taken together, the four exhibitions describe a single governing ambition: to position the Indian Ocean — rather than Europe or the Atlantic — as the central node of world cultural history. That is a curatorial argument, not merely a programming coincidence. The board games came across those waters; so did the spices and ceramics; so did the mathematical systems that Art Here 2026 will invoke; and it is communities along those routes — often among the most endangered — whose heritage Living Legacies sets out to protect.

Dr Guilhem André described the season as one that "delves deep into expansive histories of diversity and exchange," adding that each exhibition offers "a fresh angle on the connections and universal languages that define our world." That is polished institutional language, but in this case the programme earns it.