By Collage Art Exhibition at Kutubna Cultural Center, Dubai
The joy of assembling and overlaying paper cutouts, textiles, verses or colour palettes into collages is therapeutic for both the artist and the viewer. The beauty of collage art form is in its diversity and artistic autonomy. On May 16, 2026 head to the Kutubna Cultural Center, Dubai, to experience the unveiling of a Collage Art Exhibition, featuring a diverse group of artists from 26 countries, showcasing over 70 artworks created in both physical and digital mediums. Curated by Nora Qudah, the art exhibition will be on view until August 31, 2026. These works explore themes of memory, identity, migration, belonging, resilience, spirituality, culture, environment and tradition versus modernity.
Collages have captivated audiences over the years for their highly inventive and expressive compositions integrating diverse materials, images, and concepts. Pioneered by figures such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, collage as a medium rapidly developed into a sophisticated artistic language in the early 20th century, further advanced by artists including Hannah Höch and Max Ernst, and later reinterpreted in the dynamic cut-outs of Henri Matisse.
At Kutubna Cultural Center, Emirati artist Mariam bin Hammad, will display her creation – Rooted Butterfly – made using symbols from UAE’s culture, expressing a deep connection between people, nature, and spirituality. Batool Khalifa, an Egyptian artist has used paper collages to build layered visual narratives to create Tales from Rasheed Harbour, documenting the harbour and reflecting on coastal life and cultural continuity. Mohammad Danyal Zaheer from Afghanistan, will exhibit Home, representing memory, displacement and belonging, exploring the emotional and spiritual dimensions of returning, losing and reimagining home. Russian artist Vera Volodina will present her digital work The Sky Within, which explores reconciliation and conveys that peace is no longer sought externally and it unfolds from within.
Other exhibiting artists include Alberto de Blobs, a Barcelona-based graffiti writer, painter, and mural artist, Hiyam Salman, Syrian artist, who creates richly layered works by attaching textile scraps and other recycled materials onto surfaces, Pakistani artist, Nayyab Akram, who builds painterly compositions by carefully cutting and layering tiny fragments from printed media, transforming discarded images into cohesive visual forms, Daniela Godoy-Waheed, Canadian-Argentinian artist, who integrates traditional marbling techniques with Turkish Ebru and Japanese Suminagashi, with collage, archival materials, and botanical elements. American artist Stacey Kalkowski and Indian artist Shloka Shankar, who are collaborating on digital collages — Desire and Foresight — developed through a call-and-response process in which one initiates an image and the other responds with new elements, creating an evolving visual dialogue that incorporates text fragments and quotes from various authors.
The exhibition will also feature Between Spaces, a collaborative video by Swiss-based artists, Nicole Henning and Alexandra Carambellas, documenting the creation of large-scale wall collages. Using photography, installation, and spatial composition, the artists have used layering and collage techniques to explore the fluid boundaries of fiction versus reality and memory versus place, turning the making process into a performative narrative across surfaces.