Dubai
UAE
Art Jameel, an organisation that supports artists and creative communities, presents a season of solo and group exhibitions at Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai's hub for contemporary art and ideas. Featuring surveys and new commissions by Mohammad Alfaraj, Bady Dalloul, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Jumana Emil Abboud and Kamruzzaman Shadhin, alongside the large-scale group exhibition Global Positioning System, the programme unfolds across galleries and courtyards through photography, film, sculpture, works on paper, textiles and site-specific installations. Together, the exhibitions span themes of memory, ritual, desire, mortality, migration and everyday narratives, while critically engaging with landscapes, mapping systems and the infrastructures of movement.
Currently on view
Mohammad Alfaraj: Seas are sweet, fish tears are salty
Until January 4, 2026
Seas are sweet, fish tears are salty, the first institutional solo show by Mohammad Alfaraj, draws its title from the artist’s own poetic writing and reflects his deeply lyrical approach to artmaking. Curated by Rotana Shaker, the exhibition spans the indoor galleries and outdoor courtyards and brings together new commissions and existing works drawn from the Art Jameel Collection, including photography, film, sculpture and writing. Weaving an intricate web of characters, symbols and parables rooted in oral traditions, natural landscapes and everyday rituals, Alfaraj uses materials that carry cultural and ecological significance, with palm fronds, dates and found objects serving as vessels of memory and transformation.
Bady Dalloul: Self-portrait with a cat I don’t have
Until February 22, 2026
Curated by Art Jameel Senior Curator Lucas Morin, the exhibition is Dalloul’s first institutional solo in the United Arab Emirates. Blending autobiographical anecdotes with stories of individuals he encounters, the artworks—including a new series of 50 works on paper specially made for the exhibition—feature fragile heroes and ordinary people navigating systems larger than themselves. Dalloul repurposes everyday materials including books, matchboxes, board games and magazines to spark surprising dialogues across cultures and genres. His practice elevates everyday narratives into epics, bridges high and low brow, and, crucially, forges connections between non-Western cultures, often in ways that challenge conventional delineations and the Eurocentric gaze.
Upcoming exhibitions
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: The Bouquet and the Wreath
November 6, 2025-March 15, 2026
The Bouquet and the Wreath marks artist, writer and professor Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s first large-scale survey exhibition. Curated by Kittima Chareeprasit and Roger Nelson, the exhibition is presented in two parts, concurrently at Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai and MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai and runs through March 2026. It brings together artworks created over the past 45 years alongside ambitious new commissions. Flowers, beds and words recur throughout the exhibition, reflecting the artist’s enduring preoccupations with desire and mortality, difference and curiosity. The exhibition will be accompanied by a landmark publication by Press Works, compiling a range of responses to Rasdjarmrearnsook’s practice, from scholars, curators, artists and writers.
Jumana Emil Abboud
January 29, 2026-June 28, 2026
In her solo exhibition, Jumana Emil Abboud draws on Solwan (or Waters of Comfort), a 12th century compendium of moral tales by Ibn Zafar to explore five virtues including trust in God, fortitude, patience, contentment and self-denial, not as static ideals but as ongoing labours shared between artist, audience and community. She frames these virtues through a non-religious yet spiritually attentive lens, informed by her long-standing engagement with oral histories, cultural rituals and water lore. The exhibition is imagined as a landscape of the imaginary, where virtues are understood not as fixed morality or abstract themes but as living processes, activated as forms of resistance.
Artists’ Rooms: Kamruzzaman Shadhin
March-August 2026
A monumental one-room installation restaging of Kamruzzaman Shadhin’s The River Remembers (2023), part of a series of exhibitions focused on the Art Jameel Collection. In the large-scale textile artwork, handcrafted threads map the colour of the water of two rivers flowing through the Bengal delta. Engraved brass disks convey the memories and migration stories of two women affected by the 1947 partition of Bengal, whose lives were strongly marked by the rivers.
Global Positioning System
April-September 2026
A group exhibition dedicated to mapping systems, gathering works by over 30 international artists. Global Positioning System delves into topographies, transit lines and simulated landscapes to engage critically with the infrastructure of movement and navigation.
For more information, email press@artjameel.org.
