Dubai · United Arab Emirates
UAE Galleries Keep Summer Alive With a Packed Exhibition Season
Galleries across Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah are keeping their doors open through the summer months — with seven exhibitions running well into September.
Galleries and cultural institutions across the United Arab Emirates have unveiled their summer exhibition calendars, with a strong line-up spread across Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah carrying the season through to September.
The programming this year resists the usual summer slowdown. Rather than scaling back, institutions are leaning into longer run times and thematically ambitious shows — a sign of a maturing cultural infrastructure that no longer treats the hot months as downtime.
EXHIBITION LISTINGS:
Exhibition | Venue | City | Closing Date |
|---|---|---|---|
The UAE is Beautiful | Cultural Foundation | Abu Dhabi | 14 July 2026 |
Under the Same Sky | TBC | Abu Dhabi | 31 July 2026 |
Cross Scripts | Lawrie Shabibi | Dubai | 31 July 2026 |
Interoception — Juma Al Hajj | Iris Projects | Dubai | 6 August 2026 |
Seeing Ourselves | Bassam Freiha Art Foundation | Abu Dhabi | 31 August 2026 |
The Two Walks | Carbon 12 | Dubai | 5 September 2026 |
Body Quotidian | Sharjah Art Foundation | Sharjah | 20 September 2026 |
Abu Dhabi: Community, Memory and the Urban Landscape
At the Cultural Foundation in Abu Dhabi, The UAE is Beautiful brings together photographers exploring themes of national identity, cultural heritage and everyday life in the country. Notably, the exhibition extends beyond the gallery walls: visitors are invited to contribute their own images through a dedicated installation created in partnership with Emirates Post, building a participatory public photo archive. The show runs until 14 July.
Also in Abu Dhabi, Under the Same Sky gathers work by twenty UAE-based artists whose practices orbit themes of memory, urban space, ecology and cultural plurality. On view until 31 July, the exhibition reflects an ongoing curatorial interest in the built and lived environments of the Emirates — how they are experienced, remembered and imagined.
Dubai: Cross-Disciplinary Dialogue and Works on Paper
Dubai's Lawrie Shabibi is presenting Cross Scripts, an exhibition that runs until 31 July and places art, design, architecture and craft in direct conversation. The show brings together painting, sculpture, furniture, jewellery and art objects by artists and designers from across the region, making a case for the creative ecosystems that connect these disciplines rather than separate them.
At Carbon 12, The Two Walks: Works on Paper Selected by Judy Karkour is on view until 5 September. Spanning fourteen artists, the exhibition positions paper not as a support material but as a medium in its own right — a premise that encourages a close reading of mark-making, texture and process.
One of the season's most closely watched shows is Interoception, a solo exhibition by Emirati artist Juma Al Hajj at Iris Projects, open until 6 August. The work takes as its starting point the experience of crisis — political, personal, collective — and the somatic responses that follow: how distress registers in the body and shapes emotional life. It is quiet, interior work that rewards patience.
Sharjah: The Body and Its Technologies
At the Sharjah Art Foundation, Body Quotidian presents a two-person exhibition by artists Layla Majeed and Inaam Zafar, running until 20 September. The work examines the human body as a site of identity and contested meaning — how contemporary technology, social media and evolving beauty standards reshape our relationship to physical appearance, ageing and self-perception.
Institutional Collaboration and Education
The Bassam Freiha Art Foundation is showing Seeing Ourselves until 31 August, a project developed in collaboration with students from Zayed University. The exhibition comprises photographic work addressing contemporary life in the UAE — an intergenerational dialogue between an established institution and emerging voices that gives the show an immediacy often absent from more polished commercial presentations.
