Monument of Oblivion: River of Lethe by Neda Saeedi with Nicholas Busmann is a sound installation using building site elements in a continuous cycle of construction and deconstruction. Installed at a monastery ruin, it reflects on permanence and absence, collapse and renewal, and is accompanied by screenings, performances, readings, and an educational programme.
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The exhibition commemorates Sfeir-Semler Gallery’s 40th anniversary in Germany and 20th in Lebanon, presenting a survey of works that resonate with the tumult of global events and recent history. Featuring mostly new works never before shown in Beirut, the exhibition includes Wael Shawky’s video on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Rabih Mroué’s installation on regional violence, and Walid Raad’s politically charged birthday cakes dedicated to dictators.
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Salt Beyoğlu presents We’ve Been at the Tapestry Studio Since the 90s, an exhibition tracing the history and impact of the Tapestry Studio at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. Established in the 1970s and transformed from the 1990s onward under Gülçin Aksoy, the studio combined weaving with contemporary art, fostering collective, experimental, and feminist practices that bridged academia, everyday life, and Istanbul’s independent art scene.
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The Bouquet and the Wreath: Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook is the first large-scale survey exhibition dedicated to the celebrated Thai artist, writer, and professor (b. 1957). Spanning 45 years of work, including ambitious new commissions, the exhibition is presented in two parts: first at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai (July 26, 2025, to March 25, 2026), and subsequently at Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai (November 5, 2025, to March 8, 2026). The exhibition is curated by Kittima Chareeprasit and Roger Nelson. Core to Araya’s practice are enduring preoccupations with desire and mortality, difference and curiosity, reflected through recurring motifs like flowers, beds, and words. These motifs suggest the inseparable nature of happy and unhappy states: a bouquet of flowers for a celebration versus a wreath marking loss; a bed as a site of rest versus a site of suffering. A landmark publication compiling responses to Araya’s practice will accompany the exhibition.
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Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz draws upon his Arab-Jewish heritage to scrutinize Western interventions in the Middle East. His works foreground the significance of cultural heritage in times of war and probe the ways in which societies negotiate the relative value of human life and cultural monuments. At the centre of this exhibition are eight reliefs conceived specifically for Stavanger Art Museum, presented as a room within a room. These reliefs are reconstructions of sculptures that once adorned the walls of a chamber in the Assyrian Northwest Palace of Kalhu (near present-day Mosul). They form part of Rakowitz’s ongoing series “The invisible enemy should not exist,” originally initiated as a response to the looting of the Iraq Museum in 2003 following the US-led invasion of Iraq. Rather than replicating the lost objects, the artist “reappears” them using discarded materials to evoke their absence.
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This is the first presentation of works from the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection on the east coast, held at the Kalba Ice Factory, featuring rarely seen large-scale works by nine international artists. The exhibition juxtaposes the ambitions of the postcolonial state with the grief of the dispossessed. It concludes with John Akomfrah’s three-screen film Vertigo Sea (2015), which uses archival and staged footage to explore diverse sea narratives, including migration, environmental collapse, and the refugee crisis. Water is viewed alternately as a border, a gateway, and an open network.
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The exhibition explores the element of air through the lens of Arabic terminology: “Sukoon” (stillness/pause), “Hawaa” (gentle, everyday air), “Naseem,” and “Riyah.” The exhibition examines how these states influence our internal rhythms and environments, encouraging contemplation of pause and transformation. The show displays works by 15 artists, including Yousif Abdulsaid, Ammar Al Attar, Moza Al Falasi, Mohammed Kazem, and Ayman Zedani.
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Darat al Funun with The Khalid Shoman Foundation present a major collective exhibition featuring nineteen artists and collectives from countries including Jordan, Palestine, and South Africa. Inspired by global solidarity with Gaza, the exhibition spans film, installation, and research-based practices across multiple buildings. The works invite engagement with current central questions, charting a geography of reflection and resistance, and exploring themes of witnessing, memory, disappearance, and persistence.
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YAY Gallery presents the first solo exhibition, by young artist Mouk (Ali Israfilov), featuring new works created during his residency at YARAT. The show, which references a half-forgotten motel and noir-like characters, creates a space of deceleration and prolonged encounter with existence. The philosophical foundation draws on Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist principle that “existence precedes essence,” and also references Albert Camus, exploring the simultaneous anguish and relief in recognizing the arbitrariness of being. Israfilov’s works encourage a slowness of gaze, resisting “clip culture” by focusing on private rituals, objects, and social relations that define the rhythm of solitude.
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The exhibition marks the ten-year anniversary of 421 Arts Campus, offering a space for reflecting on emergent artistic practices in the UAE, their possibilities and challenges for the future. Munira Al Sayegh’s Leading to the Middle draws on the nature of expansion found within a ripple effect, pegging that movement onto the UAE’s arts landscape over the past decade. Through this lens, she traces the generosity and influence of key actors whose contributions have created lasting reverberations, marking formative turning points in the development of the scene and illuminating what preceded them. Featured artists and spaces include Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim, Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Bait15, Adele Bea Cipste, Khaled Esguerra, Lamya Gargash, and Auguste Nomeiakaite.
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“Through a language that combines formal minimalism with political tension, Hatoum questions how space is regulated, surveilled and colonised. Her work does not offer solutions, but rather builds environments of experience and suspension, in which viewers are continuously called upon to reposition themselves, to negotiate their perspective and to “see” what remains behind the scenes. In this sense, her works act as critical zones of perception, where the artistic gesture becomes a tool of excavation, deconstruction and unveiling. The exhibition’s title plays on the double meaning of “seen” and “scene,” suggesting a gaze beyond appearances, toward the hidden spaces of human experience: memory, trauma and the desire for resistance.” Curated by Giuliana Altea, Antonella Camarda and Luca Cheri.
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Eugenio Viola, General Curator of the 24th Bienal de Arte Paiz, comments: “Similar to the synaptic cartography of the ‘dendritic tree’ in neuroscience, which maps the complex connections within neural networks, ‘The World Tree’ opens up a constellation of voices, reimagined as a synaptic map, which visualizes our society as a dynamic, interconnected network—a fluid cartography of human relations, social bonds, and cultural exchanges. 46 participating artists includes both eminent and emerging Guatemalan and international figures: Maria José Arjona* / Kader Attia / Sonia Barrett / etc.
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The exhibition presents the works of the iconic Palestinian artist Laila Shawa (1940–2022), offering insights into her uniquely trans-cultural visual language. In her art, Islamic ornament meets Western pop art and Byzantine calligraphy sits alongside graffiti tags. Throughout her career, Shawa critically addressed systems of violence, be it patriarchal, colonial, military, or religious and turned them into emotionally charged, but often playful visual forms. She understood the commodification of the human body, especially the female body, as a central mechanism of power: whether through religious control, cultural roles, political propaganda, or the global media machine.
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The exhibition, curated by Alfons Hug, features twelve leading artists from across the African continent. It explores the extraordinary diversity of Africa’s art, positioning the continent not as a periphery but as a main engine of world civilization and creativity. It situates contemporary demographic, ecological, and social shifts within deeper historical lineages, highlighting Africa’s long role as a catalyst for global transformation. The works span painting, photography, installation, and sound, and unfold through four thematic directions: The echo of history, bodies and portraits, the urban drama, and vanishing voices. The show aims to introduce Azerbaijani audiences to this new generation of internationally celebrated but locally less-known African artists, whose work resists colonial frames and draws from hybrid aesthetics.
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“Following the earlier exhibitions Merciless (2018) and Roofless (2023), this solo exhibition of Neriman Polat presents the third part of an exhibition trilogy. Its parts are linked by a common suffix –less – referring to an absence: without mercy, without a roof, without land. Polat investigates in this series the progressive loss of protection, structure, and stability – physical, social, legal, and existential. Her work speaks of freedom and its endangerment, of cracking foundations, of inequality, democracy, and the attempt to gain new ground in the midst of ecological and economic crises.”
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The remote Museum Savitsky in Uzbekistan safeguards a vast collection of banned Russian avant-garde art, thanks to its founder, Soviet artist Igor Vitalievich Savitsky. He defied censors to rescue and preserve these works, aided by the unique location of Karakalpakstan. Successor Marinika Babanazarova fought for the collection’s survival. Today, with Uzbekistan undergoing political reform and economic growth, the city of Nukus has a chance for stable development and international recognition.
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Golden Family is the artistic duo of Matt Golden (b. 1974, England) and Natsue Ikeda (b. 1976, Japan), working between London and Northamptonshire. Their stylistically diverse practice incorporates a wide variety of mediums, including sculpture, painting, photography, song-writing, performance, and curating. Their artworks are united by an inherent wit and sensitivity to the human condition and the world we inhabit, often interwoven with personal narratives.
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Apolonia Sokol’s solo exhibition featrures new paintings. The show critically explores motherhood as a complex biological, psychological, and political phenomenon. Sokol engages the Madonna-Whore complex, critiquing its binary and insufficiency, such as in Madonna Whore Complex (citing Wróblewski). The exhibition rejects biological motherhood while broadening the concept to include non-biological, interspecies, and queer forms of kinship and care. Sokol’s figurative paintings use controlled layering and solid color planes, with soft pastel tones playfully contrasting the intense subject matter of birth, grief, and the need for collective care.
External Link“https://artguide.artforum.com/artguide/the-pill-14677
https://www.thepill.co/exhibitions/62-nobody-s-mother-apolonia-sokol/”
Led by Artistic Directors Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed, the theme draws on a colloquial phrase describing the cycles of encampment and journeys of nomadic communities in the Arabian Peninsula. The exhibition, opening January 30, 2026, in Riyadh’s JAX District, explores movement, migration, and cultural transmission. It views the world in “procession”—a braiding of humans, histories, stories, and planetary currents—to understand continuity, exchange, and resilience in a time of constant global transformation.
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