Welcome to The Culture Edit, your guide to the most captivating art and cultural exhibitions across the Middle East. In a region teeming with creative energy and visionary talent, it can be overwhelming to keep track of what’s worth your time. That’s where we come in. Each month, we sift through the noise to bring you a curated selection of exhibitions that spark conversation, provoke thought, and celebrate the region’s dynamic cultural pulse.
From gallery openings and immersive installations to regional festivals and museum must-sees, discover the most compelling cultural happenings of the month to bookmark below.
Without further ado, let’s get into The Culture Edit.
Art Here 2025 & Richard Mille Art Prize
Louvre Abu Dhabi, Saadiyat Island | Running until 28 December 2025
Beneath the museum’s famous dome this edition asks us to look where light gives way: Shadows are the prompt and the material. Works are deliberately sited to let architecture do half of the work, a pavilion that makes shade, a corridor that becomes a field of dimness, carved stone and kinetic screens that trade surface for silhouette. Sophie Mayuko Arni’s curatorial thread ties Japanese ideas of subtle darkness to Gulf daylight, inviting artists to treat shadow not as absence but as an active, shaping presence.
We Design Beirut
City-wide venues, Beirut | 22–26 October 2025
This is Beirut will turn into a workshop: design shows, installations, talks and studio-visits that spill through the city’s old spaces and new facades. Projects will re-read vernacular craft as contemporary design, objects and sites that look like solutions and feel like memory, offered in places you’d normally walk past. The programme frames design as civic repair: small interventions that make public life more durable and surprising.
Whispers of the Past
Sotheby’s DIFC, in collaboration with Aisha Alabbar Gallery | Running until 14 November 2025
A measured, multigenerational conversation about memory and material, where painting, textile, glass and sculptural work hold histories in their weave and surface. The show gathers voices such as Dr. Najat Makki, Khalid Al Banna, Sara Al Haddad, Sara Aref Ahli and Samar Hejazi, artists who make the past audible by letting texture carry its traces. It’s the kind of quiet exhibition that asks you to slow down and let the objects do the remembering.
The Shape of Things to Come
Efie Gallery, Warehouse 61 (Alserkal Avenue), Dubai | Running until 10 January 2026
Curated by Dexter Wimberly, this group show assembles artists whose materials read like histories in motion, metal, textile, conceptual installation, it asks how materials register a changing world. With major names on the roster including El Anatsui, Iman Issa, Abdoulaye Konaté, Yinka Shonibare and Carrie Mae Weems among others, the exhibition stages dialogues between craft and critique, memory and reinvention, scale and intimacy. This is a showcase of works that are formally sumptuous but insistently engaged, with pieces that look back to tell you where we might be heading next.
A Seat at the Table: Food & Feasting in the Islamic World
Museum of Islamic Art, Doha | Running until 8 November 2025
This exhibition serves up history on a platter: more than 100 objects drawn from the Museum of Islamic Art’s own collection, Qatar Museums’ loans, and the National Library, spread across five sections. As you move from one gallery to the next, the scent of trade, ceremony and ritual rises in a courtly feast in porcelain, copper, calligraphy and ceramic. Each section pairs ancient vessels and spoons, bowls and trays, with videos of contemporary chefs cooking the dishes that once tied together daily life and spectacle. Feasting isn’t just indulgence here; it’s politics, trade, etiquette, ritual, survival. The table is rich, the history complex, and your place at it earned.
The Narrative of Decline
CARBON 12, Dubai | Running until 6 November 2025
Curated by Bernhard Buhmann, this group show holds up decay as both mirror and magnifier. Sculptures, paintings and mixed media works drift through half-light and disfigured order, artists slipping between collapse and seduction. The decline isn’t disaster-porn, but the eerie moments just before a shift, the tension when structure loosens, when the familiar dissolves into disorientation. It’s a carousel where gravity shifts, identities fray, and the end feels familiar.
Artists include: Monika Grabuschnigg; Nour Malas; Philip Mueller; Oliver Laric; Rita McBride; Maureen Kägi; Monia Ben Hamouda; Ridley Howard; Claudia Larcher; Christoph Ruckhäberle.
And that was The Culture Edit.
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