Art events continue through the summer across the UAE with galleries and institutions in Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah presenting a range of exhibitions.
Current highlights include A Board Game Adventure at Louvre Abu Dhabi, an exhibition that traces the journey of games including chess, Mancala, Ludo and Carrom as they travelled between ancient civilisations and evolved into the games still played today; Cross Scripts at Lawrie Shabibi, which brings together art, design, architecture and craft; and Body Quotidian at Sharjah Art Foundation, which places recent works by Laila Majid and Inaam Zafar in dialogue.
Together, the exhibitions reflect a wide range of practices across the country, from photography and works on paper to sculpture, design, craft and painting.
Here are nine exhibitions to see across the UAE.
1. Cross Scripts at Lawrie Shabibi
Cross Scripts, Lawrie Shabibi’s summer exhibition, brings together artists and designers whose practices move between art, design, architecture and craft.
The group show spans painting, sculpture, furniture, craft and jewellery. It considers how objects carry meaning beyond function and how making can become a shared language. The exhibition reflects the region’s porous boundary between art and design, where geometry, ornament, utility and material traditions often overlap.
Participating artists and designers include Hamra Abbas, Omar Al Gurg’s MODU Method, Farhad Ahrarnia, Sarah Almehairi, Kamrooz Aram, Bernhard Buhmann, Nada Debs, Areen Hassan, KAMEH, Nadine Kanso’s Bil Arabi, Mehdi Moutashar, Timo Nasseri, Driss Ouadahi and Ishmael Randall-Weeks. Works by Zein Daouk, Carlo Massoud, Mary-Lynn Massoud and Rasha Nawam are also presented by Iwan Maktabi.
Until July 31; Dubai
2. Under the Same Sky at Rizq Art Initiative
Under the Same Sky brings together 20 artists in the UAE in an exhibition reflecting on the experience of living, observing and creating within the country. The show considers how artists from different cultural backgrounds respond to the UAE through memory, material, landscape and everyday life.
The exhibition features both Emirati artists and long-term residents whose practices have been shaped by their time in the country. Works range from Maitha Al Omaira’s cyanotypes of the ghaf tree and Shamsa Al Mansoori’s mixed-media reflections on contemporary Emirati identity, to Tala Atrouni’s explorations of Palestinian tatreez and Simrin Mehra-Agarwal’s research-driven works examining ecology in the UAE.
Rather than presenting a singular narrative, the exhibition approaches the UAE as a layered and evolving space shaped by movement, coexistence and personal histories. Many of the participating artists draw from architecture, textiles, poetry and urban transformation, creating works that reflect both rootedness and constant change.
Conceptualised by chief curator Meena Vari, the exhibition positions the UAE’s cultural landscape as one defined by convergence and exchange.
Participating artists include Adrian Scicluna, Ahmad Al Areef, Anne Marie Lacroix, Dina Nazmi Khorchid, Elham Shafaei, Farah Soltani, Hala El Abora, Karine Roche, Mouza Almheiri, Nikolay Koshelev, Nour Hage, Rabila Kidwai, Sara Al Sulaimani, Shamma Al Mazrouie, Sophiya Khwaja, Zahra Shafie and others.
Until July 31; Abu Dhabi
3. Interoception at Iris Projects
Juma Al Haj’s latest solo exhibition explores how moments of crisis are absorbed, processed and translated into artistic expression. Curated by Shamma Al Mheiri, Interoception takes its title from the body’s ability to sense its internal state, and examines the emotional and psychological impact of living through uncertainty.
Developed in response to the missile attacks reported in the UAE in early 2026, the exhibition traces Al Haj’s return to painting as a means of processing fear, anxiety and disruption. Through layered surfaces, fragmented text and gestural mark-making, the artist transforms personal experiences into abstract works that reflect broader feelings of collective unease and resilience.
The exhibition marks a new chapter in Al Haj’s practice, which frequently draws on journaling, writing and sensory experiences as tools for self-reflection. Several works were created in the immediate aftermath of the attacks and evolved into a larger body of work that functions as a visual record of a period of uncertainty.
While rooted in a specific moment, the exhibition expands beyond its immediate context to consider wider questions of memory, embodiment and the ways individuals internalise crisis. The result is a deeply personal yet broadly resonant exploration of how emotional experiences can be translated into visual language.
Until August 6; Abu Dhabi
4. Seeing Ourselves at Bassam Freiha Art Foundation
Seeing Ourselves is a student-led photography exhibition developed through a year-long collaboration between Bassam Freiha Art Foundation and the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises at Zayed University.
The exhibition positions Emirati students as image-makers documenting their own experiences of the UAE through architectural, portrait and landscape photography. It was conceived partly as a response to the Bassam Freiha Private Collection, shifting authorship towards contemporary Emirati perspectives and allowing young artists to present the country.
The project brought together students from photography, graphic design and visual arts programmes. They worked across the stages of exhibition-making, including installation, branding, design and curatorial development.
Until August 31; Abu Dhabi
5. The Two Walks: Works on Paper Selected by Judy Karkour at Carbon 12
The Two Walks brings together new and archival works on paper by 14 artists at Carbon 12 in Alserkal Avenue.
Selected by artist Judy Karkour, the exhibition considers paper not as a preparatory material, but as a complete and expressive medium in its own right. The works range from drawing and collage to mixed media, using paper to explore memory, abstraction, environmental fragility, urban development and inner emotional states.
Participating artists include Sarah Almehairi, Amir Khojasteh, Bernhard Buhmann, Faris Alshafar, Nour Malas, Solimar Miller, Amba Sayal-Bennett, Andre Butzer, Monika Grabuschnigg, Mayar Obedo, Nadine Ghandour, Edgar Orlaineta, Olaf Breuning and Philip Mueller.
Until September 5; Dubai
6. Human in the Loop at 421 Arts Campus
Human in the Loop is the first institutional solo exhibition by artist and engineer Ahmad AlAttar, transforming a concept from robotics and artificial intelligence into an interactive game of sound, touch and discovery.
The installation invites visitors to search for an unseen algorithm hidden within the gallery space. By pulling hanging ropes and listening to subtle changes in an evolving soundscape, participants gradually learn how the system responds. Glitches, distortions and bursts of sound act as clues, guiding visitors towards the algorithm before it relocates and the process begins again.
Drawing on AlAttar’s background in robotics engineering, the work explores the increasingly blurred relationship between humans and technology. The title references systems that rely on human input, but the installation questions whether people are directing technology or whether technology is quietly shaping human behaviour.
Developed through 421’s Artistic Development Programme, the work combines physical interaction with digital systems, encouraging visitors to reflect on attention, control and the ways technology influences everyday life. As participants become absorbed in the search, the installation raises broader questions about what is gained, and what is overlooked, when people allow themselves to be guided by algorithms.
Until September 13; Abu Dhabi
7. In Plain Sight at Gallery Isabelle
Alia Zaal’s latest solo exhibition offers an intimate exploration of the UAE landscape through paintings, works on paper and ceramic pieces that focus on fragments rather than sweeping vistas. Drawing inspiration from locations including Al Khawaneej in Dubai and the mangroves and mudflats of Abu Dhabi, the artist turns her attention to details of familiar trees and plants, creating works shaped as much by memory as by observation.
Rather than treating the landscape as a fixed subject, Zaal examines how it is perceived, remembered and reconstructed. Many of the paintings begin as smartphone photographs before being digitally altered through cropping, zooming and distortion. These interventions become part of the final work, reflecting the artist’s interest in how vision is shaped by context, technology and personal experience.
The exhibition is informed by the ideas of the 11th-century scholar Ibn Al Haytham, whose pioneering work on optics argued that sight is an active process influenced by memory and interpretation. Zaal extends these ideas through paintings that suggest the landscape is never entirely objective, but constantly transformed by the viewer’s perspective and lived experience.
Personal history also plays a role. Inspired in part by her father’s difficulty in distinguishing certain colours, the exhibition approaches vision as something individual and incomplete rather than universal. Through close-up views of ghaf trees, mangroves and other familiar environments, In Plain Sight presents the Gulf landscape as a space of memory, perception and emotional connection.
Until September 15; Dubai
8. Body Quotidian at Sharjah Art Foundation
Body Quotidian brings together recent works by Laila Majid and Inaam Zafar in an exhibition exploring the human body through metaphor, material and everyday experience.
Curated by Raja’a Khalid, assistant curator at Sharjah Art Foundation, the exhibition places Majid and Zafar’s sculptures, photographs and paintings in dialogue with one another. While their practices differ, both artists approach the body indirectly, through surfaces, silhouettes, domestic spaces and the materials that suggest flesh, heat, touch and presence.
The exhibition considers how bodies are perceived, altered and contained, particularly as technology continues to reshape ideas of youth, beauty and truth. Across the works, the body often appears in partial or suggested form, moving between intimacy, play, desire and mortality.
Until September 20; Sharjah
9. A Board Game Adventure at Louvre Abu Dhabi
A Board Game Adventure transforms Louvre Abu Dhabi into a giant playground, using some of the world’s oldest games to explore how people have connected across cultures for thousands of years. Designed for children but engaging for all ages, the exhibition traces the journey of games including chess, Mancala, Ludo and Carrom as they travelled between ancient civilisations and evolved into the games still played today.
The exhibition combines immersive installations with rare artefacts borrowed from international museums, including some of the earliest known board game objects from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran and India. Highlights include centuries-old chess pieces carved from ivory and rock crystal, engraved backgammon pieces, ancient six-sided dice and one of the earliest known predecessors of Ludo.
Interactive displays encourage visitors to solve puzzles, challenge artificial intelligence, play on oversized game boards and discover how strategy, chance and storytelling have always been part of human play. Throughout the exhibition, historical figures ranging from Queen Nefertari and Achilles to samurai Hatakeyama Shigetada are reimagined through playful “player profiles”, linking games to the personalities and cultures that shaped them.
Rather than presenting games as simple entertainment, A Board Game Adventure reveals them as cultural objects that have crossed borders, adapted to societies and brought people together for millennia.
Until April 25, 2027; Abu Dhabi