By Inside Alserkal Avenue’s New Exhibitions
This autumn expect an art overload as a string of new exhibitions open at Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue across this week. From raw steel sculptures to radical textile transformations, the 2026–27 cultural season is kicking off with a line-up that demands your full attention. Whether you are a seasoned collector or just looking for a cool evening crawl, Middle East Masala has put together the ultimate blueprint to help you navigate Alserkal Avenue’s art exhibitions.
Allusive Veil by Hisham Sharif
Ayyam Gallery, Dubai
September 23 to October 30, 2026
Bahraini artist Hisham Sharif offers a vulnerable and deeply personal view of life within a conservative society. Influenced by 19th-century French painting, Sharif’s evocative scenes explore privacy, relationships, coming of age and the quiet rituals of everyday existence, while reflecting on the struggles of both private and artistic life. Veiled yet suggestive, the paintings use colour as a curtain of illusion to balance reflection and reality. Rich brushwork and expressive colour create hazy, atmospheric compositions suspended between what was, what is and what could be. Reflective surfaces recur throughout, inviting viewers to question what is real and what is remembered — offering an intimate window into Sharif’s world.
Private World
Green Art Gallery, Dubai
September 23 to November 4, 2026
Featuring works by artists Lulua Alyahya, Rami Farook, Sohrab Hura and Khaled Jarada, this exhibition invites viewers into intimate and elusive worlds that encourage a slower, more inward way of looking. Rich in emotional resonance, the works create encounters that feel personal rather than public. Themes of solitude, seclusion and inward attention run through the exhibition. Each artist approaches intimacy differently—through personal observation, fragments of fleeting moments, relationships and lived experiences, or atmospheric spaces charged with psychological depth. Together, the works offer quiet moments of connection, inviting viewers to pause, look closer and engage with the subtle emotions and experiences that often exist beneath the surface of everyday life.
The Living Archive by Ahmad Tallaa
Firetti Contemporary, Dubai
September 21 to November 11, 2026
Syrian artist Ahmad Tallaa, explores memory, experience and the marks time leaves behind. Bringing together artist books, large-scale portraits, sculptures, tile installations and works on paper, the exhibition centres on the face as a witness rather than a likeness. Tallaa’s textured portraits, created with locally collected sand, chalk, pigment and acrylic, appear almost excavated from their surfaces. Cracks, scars and fading features evoke the passage of time. Through diverse materials and forms, The Living Archive reflects on what we carry from the past—and how experience continues to shape, but never fully define, who we become.
What We Carry Becomes The Terrain
Aisha Alabbar Gallery, Dubai
September 23 to November 7, 2026
UAE-based French artist Bénédicte Gimonnet’s was inspired by a pivotal journey to Peru, that led to a renewed engagement with her Peruvian roots. Gimonnet brings together new paintings, drawings and textile works that consider memory, cultural inheritance and the unstable sense of belonging that comes with living away from a homeland. The rainforest, recurring across more than a decade of her work, appears here not as a place depicted but as a terrain to be moved through, where recollection, imagination and lived experience converge. Having lived in the UAE for over 13 years, Gimonnet weaves fabrics from Peru, France and the UAE with traditional Emirati talli embroidery. The exhibition also features works from her Gran Eco series and intricate ink drawings exploring memory, repetition and transformation.
Zawyeh Gallery, Dubai
September 19 to November 8, 2026
In The Field of Dreams, artist Bashar Khalaf uncovers the fragile realities of contemporary existence through the relationship between the self, the object and the other. His works examine formations of “steel” in public space, transforming accumulated materials into an ambiguous reflection of humanity’s fractured present.
Through two series, Junk Garden and Protective Shield, Khalaf uses oil painting to create a complex dialogue with steel, memory and identity. The “anxious artist” emerges as a fragmented self, restless and struggling to piece together its broken parts.
Rather than seeking escape from the contradictions of the present, Khalaf invites us to confront and understand them. His work echoes Giorgio Agamben’s idea of the contemporary artist who looks firmly at their era — not at its light, but at its darkness.
The Sky Held It, The Earth Remembered
Ishara Art Foundation
September 11 to December 15, 2026
Presented in collaboration with Barcelona-based Han Nefkens Foundation, this exhibition at Ishara Art Foundation, brings together works by South Asian artists Shahana Rajani, Rohini Devasher and Sarker Protick. Exploring land, water and the cosmos as living archives, the artists reflect on memory, ecological change and the traces left by human intervention. Photography, moving image and installation reveal landscapes shaped by extraction, displacement and environmental violence.
‘The sky held it, the earth remembered’ engages with contemporary critiques of the Anthropocene, rejecting a human-centred vision of the world in favour of the view that people and non-human forces are irrevocably intertwined. Rather than a passive witness to history, the earth embodies the effects of environmental destruction and infrastructural violence.
The Butterfly’s Garden, Nada Elkalaawy
September 23 to November 7, 2026
Borrowing its title from Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry, the exhibition brings together Egyptian artist Nada Elkalaawy’s paintings centred around universal themes of love, connection, life and death. Developed through layered processes of accumulation and erasure – her art includes ephemeral forms. Flowers, butterflies, domestic objects, family photographs and ghostly forms drift between presence and absence. Drawing from her personal photographic archive and Egyptian upbringing, emerging from experiences of grief and loss, the works also carry traces of hope, at times blurring the boundaries between the lived, remembered and imagined.
Sojourner: The Difference is the Same, Maggie Otieno
Efie Gallery
September 23 to November 13, 2026
A solo exhibition of new works by Kenyan artist Maggie Otieno 2024. Spanning nearly three decades, Otieno’s practice transforms reclaimed and distressed materials into semi-abstract forms exploring history, memory, human interaction and environmental survival. Known for large-scale public installations across Nairobi, the artist works across wood, metal and mixed media. The exhibition features works created in her Karen studio in Kenya, centred on historic railway sleepers more than 150 years old. Originally transported from India to Kenya during the colonial era, these timbers carry layers of history, movement and memory.
The Canticle of the Birds, Katia Kameli
Taymour Grahne Projects
September 23 to November 10, 2026
French-Algerian artist Katia Kameli reimagines Farid ud-Din Attar’s 12th-century Sufi epic The Conference of the Birds. Through watercolours, bird-shaped ceramic sculptures and video works, Kameli revisits the allegorical journey of birds in search of the mythical Simorgh. The exhibition brings together folklore, spirituality, migration and ecological concerns, connecting Attar’s timeless tale with contemporary urban life. In Kameli’s video Le Cantique des oiseaux, variation (2022), (The Canticle of the Birds) actresses perform a procession while playing bird-shaped ceramic instruments, each producing a distinct whistle to form a polyphonic avian chorus. Kameli uses earthenware in this body of work. This exhibition marks a shift in the materiality of her practice, which, for the last 25 years, has centred on video and photography, often interrogating archival materials and history-making.
May the Tree No Longer Burn When I Wake
Amir Khojasteh
Carbon 12 Gallery
September 23 to November 5, 2026
Iranian artist Amir Khojasteh presents his first body of work developed after leaving his home country. Inspired by a garden in a barren land protected by walls resonated deeply with his experience of departure and distance. A storyteller at heart, Khojasteh unfolds a narrative through paintings, sculptures, and installations.
Inspired by the Persian garden, the exhibition imagines a protected space transformed by the experience of departure. Paintings, sculptures and installations unfold a surreal landscape of limbless figures, softened bodies and ambiguous smiles. Vincent van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows becomes a recurring reference, reworked through the artist’s reflections on Iran’s Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Ash emerges as both a symbol of destruction and the possibility of new beginnings, while authority, identity and power gradually dissolve.
I Bloom Where You Hold Me
Tirdad Hashemi and Soufia Erfanian
Gallery Isabelle
September 23 to November 4, 2026
Iranian artists Tirdad Hashemi and Soufia Erfanian’s I Bloom Where You Hold Me include hand-drawn graffiti on gallery walls as part of a floral series. Flowers emerge as recurring symbols of care, sustenance and growth. First begun in 2022, the series are inspired by the artists’ interactions while tending to plants, understanding cycles of life, death and renewal, as metaphors for real life situations, coping with relationships, resistance and everyday challenges.
Between Land and Sea, Azza Al Qubaisi
September 23 to November 10, 2026
Emirati artist Azza Al Qubaisi explores memory, identity, place and cultural heritage through a multidisciplinary practice. Al Qubaisi’s work bridges traditional Emirati materials such as palm fronds, Ghaf tree patterns, and Sadu weaving with contemporary metals — steel and precious jewellery. Her creative vision moves fluidly between the inland desert dunes and the coastal maritime traditions of the Gulf, symbolizing resilience, community roots, and historical memory.
