Art on View: This September

September signals more than the return of cooler evenings and busier social calendars — it marks the beginning of a new season for art. With fresh exhibitions opening their doors, familiar venues welcoming audiences back and new artistic conversations waiting to unfold, the month brings a renewed flavour to UAE’s ever-evolving art scene. From thought-provoking contemporary works to immersive installations and diverse cultural narratives, September promises to paint the city with new ideas, perspectives and possibilities.

Here is Middle East Masala’s guide to art exhibitions opening across the emirates this September — inviting you to step back into the galleries and savour the season’s newest creative offerings:

Nothing Worth Mentioning by Ola Allouz

Kutubna Cultural Center

Until September 27, 2026

Can a Feeling Be Archived? Nothing Worth Mentioning, a photography exhibition curated by Dubai-born visual artist and photographer Ola Allouz, explores the beauty hidden in life’s seemingly ordinary moments. The exhibition brings together over 40 works by 16 UAE-based photographers, capturing personal rituals, everyday encounters, gestures, relationships and familiar places.

Inspired by Allouz’s photography trips to Kumzar, Oman, where moments of sharing food, stories and laughter lingered more powerfully than the photographs themselves, the exhibition asks: Can a feeling be archived? From tea rituals and shared meals to family bonds, friendship, solitude and quiet moments by the sea, the works reveal how the seemingly insignificant can hold profound emotional meaning. An interactive installation, Therapy Mail Club by Emirati writer Ayesha Alyassi, further invites visitors to write and share messages inspired by the exhibition’s themes.

Unseen Script

Rizq Art Initiative (RAi) Abu Dhabi

September 11 to October 28, 2026

Unseen Script, brings together 10 contemporary artists to explore the quiet rhythms, memories and unseen patterns that shape everyday life. Ongoing at Rizq Art Gallery on Al Reem Island, Abu Dhabi, the exhibition reflects on how people navigate a rapidly changing world while carrying forward familiar habits, routines and ways of being. Through paintings, objects, found materials, calligraphy and abstract forms, the artists explore the space between what is seen and what is felt, what changes and what remains.

The exhibition features pioneering Emirati artist Dr Najat Makki, Nujoom Alghanem and Nasir Nasrallah, alongside Joanna Barakat, Ismail Al Rifai, Neveen Abu Samra, Ana Escobar Saavedra, Fadi Balhawan, Simrin Mehra Agarwal and Abdulla P A. Together, their diverse practices invite viewers to pause and reconsider the subtle forces and shared experiences that quietly shape the way we perceive the world.

85 Seconds To Midnight, Mohamed Monaiseer

September 22 to October 1, 2026

In 85 Seconds To Midnight, Egyptian artist, Mohamed Monaiseer explores history as a cycle of repetition, examining how war, occupation and imperial power resurface across generations. Developed during the war on Gaza while the artist was in residence in Spain, the exhibition questions how violence is remembered, mediated and imagined. Bringing together around 40 artworks, paintings, sculptures, textile works and a video installation, Monaiseer blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction. References to news, literature, folklore and myth reveal how stories shape our understanding of conflict.

The title, 85 Seconds To Midnight, invokes the current status of the Doomsday Clock, and its measurement of humanity’s proximity to catastrophe. Time is mobilised in various ways in this series, as a countdown to judgement day and through the idea of cycles. The exhibition brings together a web of references to explore how violence repeats across time and how the stories through which we encounter it are subjective and constructed.

Precarious Beings by Hamad Almuzaini

Tashkeel, Dubai

Until October 11, 2026

Exploring placemaking, the built environment and the subtle rhythms of Kuwait City, Precarious Beings examines how people construct, inhabit and negotiate their sense of place. Kuwaiti artist Almuzaini interrogates the urban identity in Kuwait City following its 1951 modern masterplan. Across photography, drawing and sculpture, Almuzaini transforms familiar urban elements into thoughtful observations of everyday life. His interdisciplinary practice brings attention to the quiet behaviours, unspoken negotiations and subconscious motivations that shape how we experience cities, spaces and our place within them.

Boundaries and Breaches

Dom Art Projects, Dubai

September 23 to October 11, 2026

Iranian artist Sara Masinaei’s Boundaries and Breaches explores how urban spaces shape memory, movement and lived experiences. Through walking, collecting found objects and recording traces of overlooked surfaces, she treats the city’s ground as an active part of how we experience and navigate our surroundings. Her works include monoprints created by pressing canvas directly onto urban surfaces, alongside sculptural pieces that explore the tension between order and disruption, showing how boundaries can contain the possibility of being breached. Interestingly, a number of artworks created from found objects are from her long walks around the Al Quoz area in Dubai, a location where she is currently exhibiting.

Reimagined

Artbooth Gallery, Abu Dhabi

September 17 to October 31, 2026

With Reimagined, Palestinian-Syrian-Dutch artist Oussama Diab, presents a remarkable series of reinterpretations of some of the most celebrated masterpieces in the history of Western art, including Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Michelangelo, and Anthony van Dyck. Diab revisits these historic compositions through his own distinctive visual language, shaped by displacement, resilience, and an unwavering belief in humanity.  Among the highlights of the exhibition are two striking reinterpretations of Picasso’s monumental “Guernica”, revisiting one of the twentieth century’s most powerful anti-war paintings through Diab’s own lived understanding of conflict and displacement. The exhibition also includes “La Coiffure” after Picasso, alongside reinterpretations of Anthony van Dyck’s “Jupiter and Antiope” and “Moses and the Serpent”, as well as two evocative sunflower paintings inspired by Vincent van Gogh.

Golden Harvest, Lasting Bloom

Andakulova Gallery, DIFC, Dubai

September 2026 11 to October 11, 2026

Celebrating autumn as a season of maturity, abundance and richness, this exhibition explores the changing beauty of nature through colour, light, form and texture. Autumn is a time when nature reaches a particular expressive intensity. The transparency and brightness of the departing summer gradually give way to the deeper, richer palette of the mature season, creating landscapes filled with layered colours, textures and atmosphere. The exhibition brings together works by Central Asian artists Rimma Gagloeva, Javlon Umarbekov, Timur Akhmedov, Vera Nechaeva and others. Each artist interprets the season through their own distinctive visual language, discovering personal expressions through colour, light, form and art techniques. A celebration of nature’s richness and transformation, the exhibition invites viewers to experience autumn not just as a season, but as a source of endless artistic inspiration.

Essence of Egypt

Fann A Porter Gallery, Dubai

September 17 to November 25, 2026

Essence of Egypt, presented in collaboration with George Al Ama and Amjad Ghannam, brings works by six Palestinian artists whose practices were shaped by Egypt’s cultural landscape. Spanning the 1960s to the early 2000s, the exhibition explores identity, memory, displacement and artistic exchange through printmaking, etching, leather, mixed media and large-scale works.

Nabil Anani, Samira Badran, Tayseer Barakat and Mostafa Al Hallaj, alongside Kamel Al Moghani and Abdul Rahman Al Muzayyen, reveal distinct artistic responses to history and experience. Together, their works illuminate the enduring creative dialogue between Palestine and Egypt and its influence on modern Arab art.

DNA: The Code Beneath by Tasveer Maharaj

Avid Learning Center for Culture and Creative Expressions, Dubai

15 to 30 September, 2026 

Dubai-based South African artist Tasveer Maharaj displays 15 works on paper in ink and mixed media, exploring the space between chance and intention, chaos and control, abstraction and representation. Through layers of ink, erosion, reaction and accumulation, the artist allows forms to emerge organically, while deliberate marks and interventions shape what remains.

Each work becomes a record of its own making, preserving traces of decisions, accidents, reactions and discoveries. Maharaj’s art looks beyond the visible form and considers the histories, processes and hidden structures that lie beneath the surface, reflecting two sides of the artist in constant conversation, where quiet logic meets imagination.