As 2025 draws to a close, cities across the Middle East are alive with exhibitions that explore memory, innovation, resilience, and the shifting landscapes of contemporary life. From light-driven installations in Riyadh to meditations on identity in Abu Dhabi, the region’s cultural scene is more dynamic than ever. Here is a curated look at the shows currently shaping conversations across art, culture, and design.
Riyadh — In the Blink of an Eye
Location: Citywide & Riyadh Metro
Dates: Nov. 20 – Dec. 6, 2025
The Noor Riyadh festival returns with a sweeping citywide experience that transforms public space into a glowing network of light, motion, and interaction. Architectural landmarks radiate with installations that converse with history, while along the metro lines, kinetic sculptures and responsive lighting shift with the movement of passengers.
This year’s theme focuses on perception and speed—how cities breathe, change, and reflect us back to ourselves. Visitors can expect immersive works that respond to presence and motion, turning a simple metro ride into a luminous journey.
Doha — we refuse_d
Location: Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art
Dates: Until Feb. 6, 2026
In Doha, we refuse_d brings together fifteen artists whose works confront the pressures of censorship, displacement, and social constraint. Through installations, video works, and performance-based pieces, the exhibition maps resilience as an act of creation.
Each artwork becomes a gesture of refusal—refusal to disappear, to remain silent, or to surrender creativity. It is a collective statement of endurance that resonates far beyond museum walls.
Amman — In That Same Hour
Location: Darat al Funun
Dates: Nov. 18, 2025 – May 31, 2026
This contemplative exhibition spans multiple spaces within Darat al Funun, reflecting on sudden moments that change lives, homes, and landscapes. Artists from across the region explore the fragility of memory in the face of loss, conflict, and displacement.
Through photography, sculpture, video, and mixed media, the exhibition rebuilds fragments of stories that risk fading—offering visitors an experience that shifts between intimate testimony and broader collective memory.
Beirut — slow burn
Location: Beirut Art Center
Dates: Nov. 13, 2025 – Feb. 28, 2026
In Beirut, slow burn invites visitors into the heart of the creative process itself. Emerging artists work on-site, allowing audiences to witness ideas forming, unraveling, and transforming in real time.
The exhibition revolves around the metaphor of fire—not destruction, but latent energy, tension, and renewal. From delicate, tactile works to large-scale installations, slow burn captures the essence of making art in a city defined by resilience.
Abu Dhabi — Art Here: Shadows
Location: Louvre Abu Dhabi
Dates: Oct. 11 – Dec. 28, 2025
Art Here 2025 gathers artists from the GCC, the wider MENA region, and Japan to respond to the theme of Shadows. The show explores how presence and absence shape identity, memory, and perception.
Visitors encounter works that play with contrast, concealment, and subtle shifts in light—some experiential, others quiet and reflective. This edition demonstrates how regional and international artists converse across shared questions of history and selfhood.
Cairo — Salah Abdel Kerim: Philosopher of Form
Location: Safarkhan Gallery
Dates: Nov. 19 – Dec. 10, 2025
Marking the centennial of one of Egypt’s modern art pioneers, this exhibition celebrates Salah Abdel Kerim’s expansive practice across sculpture, painting, ceramics, and design. Known for his groundbreaking use of negative space in sculpture, Abdel Kerim redefined the language of form in Egyptian art.
The exhibition brings together influential works and rare personal pieces, offering a glimpse into the evolution of an artist who fused ancient Egyptian references with bold modernist experimentation.
Conclusion
Across the Middle East, galleries and cultural spaces are presenting exhibitions that challenge, inspire, and provoke. Whether your interests lean toward immersive light installations, politically engaged works, or reflective meditations on memory and identity, this week’s lineup offers something for every curious mind.
Art in the region continues to thrive not only as expression but as dialogue—an ongoing conversation between history, place, and imagination.
