UAE Galleries Keep Summer Alive With a Packed Exhibition Season

EXHIBITION LISTINGS:

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.