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 Basel Qatar
M7, Doha | Doha Design District, Msheireb, Doha | 5, 6 & 7 February 2026
Art Basel arrives in Doha for its fifth global edition, introducing a new fair format shaped by conceptual rigor and regional dialogue. Departing from the traditional booth model, the inaugural Art Basel Qatar unfolds as an open-format exhibition, with solo gallery presentations responding to a central curatorial theme.
Titled Becoming, the first edition reflects on humanity’s continuous transformation, positioning the Gulf as a layered cultural landscape of oral histories, digital networks, and evolving systems surrounding belief converge. Led by Artistic Director Wael Shawky alongside Art Basel’s Chief Artistic Officer Vincenzo de Bellis, the fair frames art not as market spectacle, but as a living structure that translates social change into form, meaning, and collective imagination.
1-54 Contemp. African Art Fair 1-54 Marrakech
La Mamounia, Avenue Bad Jdid, Marrakech 40040, Morocco | 5, 6, 7 & 8 February 2026
Returning for its seventh edition, 1-54 Marrakech returns as a vital meeting point for contemporary African art as it continues to position Africa and its diasporas at the centre of global contemporary art conversations. Within the historic grounds of La Mamounia, the fair brings together galleries and institutions from across the continent and beyond, fostering dialogue outlined by diversity, memory, and cultural exchange.
1-54 operates as a meeting point, allowing artistic practices to intersect with questions of identity, migration, and representation. Between modernist legacies and experimental futures, 1-54 continues to frame Africa as a constellation of voices in dialogue.
Beirut — Slow Burn
Jisr el Wati, off Corniche an-Nahr, Beirut | Until February 28, 2026
Slow Burn unfolds as a collective meditation on process, instability, and latent power. Developed through months of shared studio time at Beirut Art Center, the exhibition privileges becoming over completion. While fire serves as its conceptual spark, the works linger in the spaces before combustion; the spaces where energy simmers quietly, where mourning, violence, and material transformation coexist. Curated by Danielle Makhoul, the show invites viewers into an atmosphere of sustained attention: a temperature that never cools, only shifts.
Desert x AlUla 2026
AlUla, Medina | Until February 28, 2026
Desert X returns to AlUla with site-specific installations that blur the line between artwork and landscape. Set across ancient rock formations and the open desert, the exhibition invites artists to respond to geological time, cultural memory, and ecological fragility. Titled Space Without Measure, the 2026 edition draws on the poetic philosophy of Kahlil Gibran, exploring themes of perception, possibility, and the boundless nature of the human spirit.
Artistic directors Raneem Farsi and Neville Wakefield are joined by curators Wejdan Reda and Zoé Whitley, who bring together multigenerational Saudi and international artists responding to AlUla’s layered history and geological vastness. Here, sculpture dissolves into horizon, sound merges with wind, and human intervention becomes temporary. The desert is the collaborator.
Metro Diaries: Musings of a Collective Moving Experience
Sima Performing Arts, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai | 14 & 15 February 2026
Metro Diaries translates the rhythms of daily movement into performance. Rooted in the shared experience of commuting, the work reflects on bodies in transit, how proximity, repetition, and routine structure emotional and physical space. Through choreography, sound, and collective presence, the piece turns the mundane into choreography, tracing intimacy within motion and connection within the crowd.
Created by Filipino theatre-makers Trixie Danielle, Juan Gonzales, and Jomel Duran Reyes, the piece mixes spoken word, movement, and ambient sound to mirror the rhythm of real metro journeys. Each vignette unfurls like a shared pause in time: strangers meet, interact, and part ways, carrying more than just destinations. At its core, Metro Diaries is a meditation on migration, memory, and the universal desire to feel seen, even in passing.
And that was the Culture Edit for February.
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