Art Dubai 2022: Exhibitions to See in the U.A.E.

With Art Dubai (11–13 March 2022) returning to the Madinat Jumeirah Conference and Events Centre this March for its 2022 edition, Ocula Magazine explores some of the U.A.E.'s must-see exhibitions this spring across Dubai, Sharjah, and Abu Dhabi.

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EXHIBITIONS IN DUBAI

Safwan Dahoul: Awake
Ayyam Gallery, Alserkal Avenue Unit B11
8 March–15 May 2022

Syrian painter Safwan Dahoul's sober figurations are known for depicting intimate moments that evoke human solitude and alienation. Awake follows the artist's 'Dream' series (late 1980s–ongoing), where nightmares intersect with longing for the homeland.

Roused from sonmolescence, Dahoul's haunting protagonists have been gathered in a 16-metre-long polyptych assembled from eight canvases for the present exhibition.

Michael Sailstorfer: Heavy Eyes
Carbon 12, Alserkal Avenue Unit 37
8 March–5 May 2022

Painted with eyeshadow pigments collected from cosmetic companies, Michael Sailstorfer's new eyeshadow-on-lead series employs unconventional materials to explore social and historical developments informed by industrial production.

One such composition, Heavy Eyes 46 BLUE BROWN (2021) depicts a basin of teal against a rough lead surface, adding a touch of colour to a potentially toxic material.

Jitish Kallat: Order of Magnitude
Ishara Art Foundation, Alserkal Avenue Unit A3
16 February–1 July 2022

Jitish Kallat's two-decade-long interest in historical recurrence, time, the cosmos and reflecting the dense metropolis of Mumbai comes together for his first major solo exhibition in Dubai.

Including new paintings, multimedia installations, and site-specific interventions, dynamic forms of image-making blend macro and micro occurrences, often beginning from sketches that capture temporal progression within the everyday.

In the multilayer photocollage Epicycles (2021), browning leaves and blurred figures rest inside a standing teakwood frame, rendered from journal drawings that record minute changes in the artist's studio, against cracking walls and peeling surfaces.

Nazgol Ansarinia: Lakes drying, tides rising
Green Art Gallery, Alserkal Avenue Unit 28
8 March–7 May 2022

Tehran-born artist Nazgol Ansarinia's work investigates structures and systems of the everyday—including objects, routines, and experiences—as an inquiry into the relationship between public and private life and culture as a site of emotional catharsis.

Across drawing, video, and sculpture, Lakes drying, tides rising at Green Art Gallery references Iran's water crisis to exemplify the collective desire of a particular time, while marking resulting shifts in the proximal landscape.

In the large-scale concrete and plaster model The Inverted Pool (2019), a small locker room is submerged inside a swimming pool, hinting at the suffocation of social activity following natural resource depletion.

A Slightly Curving Place
Alserkal Arts Foundation, Alserkal Avenue
3–13 March 2022

Shown as part of Alserkal Art Week (3–13 March 2022), A Slightly Curving Place is the first ambisonic soundscape in the U.A.E., made in homage to acoustic archaeologist Umashankar Manthravadi, who set up the world's largest ethnomusicology archive in the 1980s.

Bringing together works by writers, choreographers, composers, actors, dancers, and musicians, the exhibition will feature an audio play and a video installation organised around biographical elements of Manthravadi's life.

Shreyas Karle: SHIFTING THE CENTER TABLE
Grey Noise, Alserkal Avenue Unit 24
15 January–31 March 2022

Using the centre table as a motif to explore form and function, Shreyas Karle's presentation at Grey Noise features objects and ideas gathered from different timelines—staged as a fictional exhibition.

Solitary chairs become the focal point when placed at the centre of the room, while the table display is pushed to the far end. Questions of object functionality arise in Karle's hypothetical setting and its disruption of traditional domestic arrangements.

Taus Makhacheva: A Space of Celebration
Jameel Arts Centre, Jaddaf Waterfront
23 February–14 August 2022

Narrating social and cultural life in post-Soviet Dagestan, Russian artist Taus Makhacheva's complex stagings will be shown in Dubai for the first time as part of the artist's retrospective at Jameel Arts Centre.

Cultural authenticity and historical fluctuations are explored across humorous but observant video works and installations depicting faulty gymnast training grounds, Soviet-era circuses, wedding halls, and suspended mountain ranges.

Makhacheva's Superhero Sighting Society (2019) project, for instance, gathers voices from around the world attesting to superhero sightings, evoking the figures of power that emerge in response to specific landscapes and environments.

Fahd Burki: Daydreams
Jameel Arts Centre, Jaddaf Waterfront
5 March–9 October 2022

Pakistani artist Fahd Burki's first major solo exhibition expands the artist's formal lexicon to a series of new relief works that refer to processes of subtraction, returning geometric blocs to their basic forms to highlight their material nature.

Painted and sculpted works made over the last 15 years narrate a visual practice patterned by symmetry, repetition, and symbolism, as with early figurations like the cedar and perspex sculpture Optimist (2012), where satire and reverence appear in the same wooden figure propped on a pair of crutches; shown alongside later grid abstractions.

Hashel Al Lamki: Sensu Lato
Tabari Artspace, The Gate Village Building 3, Level 2
7 March–1 May 2022

Emirati painter Hashel Al Lamki's vivid mountainscapes render the social and psychological elements of landscape, along with concerns for local fauna and flora, animal and land migration, and the relationship between humans and their environments.

Sensu Lato will feature new paintings and mix-media works inspired by Al Lamki's ongoing interest in Jebel Hafeet, depicting the mountain range in striking tones in response to ecological changes in region.

Connecting Minds, Creating the Future
Expo 2020 Dubai, Expo Road
1 October 2021–31 March 2022

Inspired by Arab mathematician, astronomer, and physicist Ibn al-Haytham's research into visual perception, curator Tarek Abou El Fetouh's contemporary art programme is a highlight at Expo 2020 Dubai—the first World Expo in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia region. Presented around the Expo grounds are a series of outdoor sculpture commissions by 11 artists including Shaikha Al Mazrou, Olafur Eliasson, Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, and Haegue Yang.

Among them, Monira Al Qadiri's iridescent sculpture Chimera (2021) is modelled to resemble a massive oil drill embedded with pearl shapes. Enticing yet alien, it is at once a celebration and warning of the potential fallout of oil extraction.

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EXHIBITIONS IN SHARJAH

Khalil Rabah: What is not
Sharjah Art Museum, Al Shuwaihean
4 March–4 July 2022

What is not gathers scaled models and ongoing projects by artist and architect Khalil Rabah, who proposes experimental platforms and frameworks to explore changes in cultural institutions and curatorial and museological discourses during states of emergency, or following displacement.

Dating back to the 1990s, overviews of Rabah's projects like the Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind (2000s) will be on display, offering alternative visions of institutional spaces while inquiring into the politics of artefact conservation.

Aref El Rayess
Sharjah Art Museum, Al Shuwaihean
26 February–7 August 2022

With a body of work spanning tapestry, sculpture, and painting inspired by a lifetime of travel between Senegal, Lebanon, and Paris, self-taught artist Aref El Rayess' museum retrospective brings together rarely seen works, in which motifs from West African folklore blend with abstraction.

The pastel on paper Paysage (2022), for instance, recovers bright colour palettes evocative of traditional African garments to create a French countryside landscape using an assemblage of near-geometric shapes, conveying impressions caught in passage.

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EXHIBITIONS IN ABU DHABI

Memory, Time, Territory
Louvre Abu Dhabi, Saadiyat
18 November 2021–27 March 2022

The first ART HERE exhibition at Louvre Abu Dhabi for the Richard Mille Art Prize gathers submissions by seven artists. Personal experiences collate to form collective trajectories, which span prehistoric nomadic cultures to displacements that mark the contemporary age.

Among the shortlisted artists, Latifa Saeed's glass sculpture The Pathway (2021) addresses Dubai's social geography and the fragility of constructed environments by drawing attention to the cracks and crevices along the city's brick pavements.

Parthenogenesis
The NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, Saadiyat
1 March–12 June 2022

Known for immersive, surrealist works across painting, performance, and animation, the 13-year collaboration between Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian has shaped networks of dialogue over time, which extend into Parthenogenesis.

Offered as a landscape, Parthenogenesis traces the artwork's evolution in relation to the artists' engagement with others, drawing from previous conversations with other artists, collaborators, and visitors. —[O]