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.
What Remains: Daniel Arsham
Perrotin Galley Dubai, DIFC, UAE | Running Until January 10, 2026
Daniel Arsham distorts time and memory in What Remains, his first solo exhibition in the UAE, now open at Perrotin Dubai. The gallery becomes a resonant landscape where his copper-wrapped bonsai sculptures merge nature with industrial permanence. Alongside them, new works from his Labyrinth series and his ongoing Fictional Archaeology project explore objects as vessels of collective memory. Over two decades, Arsham has crafted a visual language that reimagines the boundaries of material and temporality. Here, nostalgia meets speculation, past and future collapse into form. What Remains is less about preservation than transformation, a meditation on how art, like memory, endures through its own erosion.
The Raw and The Cooked: Thomas Dillon
Opera Gallery Dubai, DIFC, UAE | Running Until November 17, 2025
Thomas Dillon takes over Opera Gallery Dubai with The Raw and the Cooked, his first solo show in the city — and it’s one worth adding to your cultural calendar. Borrowing its title from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s iconic text, the exhibition explores the space between instinct and intellect, chaos and control. Dillon’s new paintings fuse raw emotion with studied composition, blurring where nature ends and culture begins. There’s something deeply tactile and cerebral about his approach, colour and gesture clash, then reconcile, in a kind of visual philosophy. The Raw and the Cooked is a quiet, thoughtful reminder of how art keeps rewriting the myths we live by.
Blooming Garden: Van Cleef & Arpels
Les Salons, Dubai Opera, UAE | Running Until November 24, 2025
Van Cleef & Arpels brings its timeless craftsmanship to Dubai with Blooming Garden at Les Salons, Dubai Opera, a showcase tracing the Maison’s decades-long devotion to floral form. From the jewel-toned opulence of the 1930s to the sunlit elegance of the 1960s, each piece reveals how nature has remained the brand’s most enduring muse. Sculpted petals, invisible settings, and radiant colour harmonies capture beauty at its most intricate. Archival sketches sit beside era-defining designs, offering a rare glimpse into a heritage shaped by precision and imagination. Blooming Garden is not nostalgia, it’s craftsmanship caught in eternal bloom.
In The Blink Of An Eye: Noor Riyadh
Citywide, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia | November 20 – December 6
Wang Yuyang’s Moon 20190901 (2019) and Relationship (2018) lit up Venice as part of Noor Riyadh’s preview showcase, a glimpse of what’s to come when the festival returns to the Saudi capital this November. Both works unravel light as language: one reimagines the moon’s unseen hues, the other transforms motion into quiet choreography. Together, they bridge emotion and technology with a sense of meditative precision.
In Riyadh, In the Blink of an Eye promises to expand that dialogue citywide, tracing light through historic streets and along the new metro’s modern veins. The festival mirrors the city itself, in motion, radiant, and constantly rewriting its own rhythm.
Khafar: Shamsa Al Omaira
Abu Dhabi Royal Equestrian Arts, UAE
Shamsa Al Omaira’s Khafar brings the language of the shayla into sculptural form, a gesture so familiar it often goes unnoticed, reimagined here as a symbol of power in motion. Installed at Abu Dhabi Royal Equestrian Arts, the fibreglass and steel artwork flows as though the wind itself has shaped it, capturing a moment of lift and freedom. Its form holds the subtle imprint of a rider, a presence not explicitly shown, but undeniably felt.
Equestrian culture is built on trust, rhythm, and unspoken balance, and Khafar channels that dynamic into every curve. The shayla becomes a bridge between tradition and transformation, carrying the stories of the women who ride, their poise, their resilience, their refusal to be still. Light activates the sculpture throughout the day, turning the fabric-like folds into shifting shadows and bright edges. In that constant change, Khafar honours movement not as spectacle, but as identity.
Of Land and Water: Works from the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection
Kalba Ice Factory, Kalba, UAE l Running Until May 31, 2026
In the Malay language, tanah air, literally “land” and “water”, forms the word for homeland, a phrase that feels almost poetic in a region defined by its islands and tides. The Sharjah Art Foundation’s exhibition of Land and Water borrows this layered idea to question what it truly means to belong.
Curated by Jiwon Lee alongside Abdulla Aljanahi, Amal Al Ali, Souraya Kreidieh, and Shahd Murshed, the show gathers works by nine artists and collectives who explore the fragile boundaries between territory, identity, and displacement. Water runs through each work, as border, witness, and memory, tracing stories of migration, nation-building, and loss.
The result is a quietly powerful reflection on how geography shapes belonging, and how art, like the tide, resists containment. A must-see for anyone drawn to conversations around place, history, and the poetics of movement.
Threads of Impact: Fashion Trust Arabia
M7, Doha, Qatar | Running Until January 6, 2026
In Doha, Threads of Impact at M7 is the kind of exhibition that reminds you why fashion matters, not as luxury, but as language. Presented by Fashion Trust Arabia, it marks seven years of championing Arab designers who’ve turned Arab fashion into a global cultural dialogue.
Curated by Omoyemi Akerele, the show brings together over 80 designers whose work threads together identity, innovation, and purpose. Among them, Jordanian designer Dara Hamarneh stands out with her sculptural leather handbags that capture the modern language of refinement.
Threads of Impact feels both reflective and forward-looking, a glimpse into the creative pulse shaping what contemporary Arab design looks and feels like today.
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