From Dubai to Doha, July offers a wealth of opportunities to experience contemporary art across the Gulf. This month’s exhibition programme spans photography, painting, installation, sculpture, craft, and archival research, bringing together both established and emerging artists from the region and beyond. Whether exploring urban transformation or the relationship between material and memory, these shows reflect the diversity and dynamism of the Gulf’s artistic landscape. Here are our top 10 exhibitions not to miss in July 2026.
1. Under the Same Sky
The Rizq Art Initiative (RAi) has organised Under the Same Sky, a group show curated by Meena Vari. It brings together 20 Emirati artists and practitioners from different international backgrounds who now reside in the UAE, offering a nuanced reflection on belonging, migration, and shared experience. Through a wide range of artistic approaches, the participants examine how living in the Emirates shapes their creative practices, which results in a poetic portrait of a nation defined by movement and cultural exchange. The exhibition will remain open until 20 July.
2. After the Image by Charlie Koolhaas
Until 16 July 2026, XVA Gallery Dubai is hosting After the Image, a solo exhibition by artist, photographer, and writer Charlie Koolhaas. The project transforms one of the rooms at the XVA Art Hotel into a lived-in archive of Dubai’s architectural past, blurring the boundaries between installation and gallery display. Combining photography, textiles, sculpture, and everyday objects, the show draws on Koolhaas’ long-term research into the city’s rapidly evolving urban fabric and invites visitors to reflect on memory, architecture, and the traces left behind by constant change.
3. Who I Become by Salmah Al Mansoori
At Maraya Art Centre, Emirati artist Salmah Al Mansoori presents Who I Become, a solo exhibition curated by Cima Azzam. On display until 30 July 2026, the show features works on paper, material-based compositions, and installations, investigating memory, transformation, and materiality. Al Mansoori works with fibres, organic matter, and found materials to explore the continual evolution of materials through processes of accumulation, fragmentation, and renewal.
4. Interoception by Juma Al Haj
Meanwhile, Iris Projects is holding Interoception, Emirati artist Juma Al Haj’s solo exhibition. Rooted in abstraction, gesture, and text, his work delves into the emotional and psychological dimensions of lived experience. Centred on the concept of interoception, the body’s ability to perceive its internal state, the exhibition reflects on how crises and emotional responses are processed and ultimately transformed into visual form. The show will end on 6 August 2026.
5. Cross Scripts
This exhibition at Lawrie Shabibi brings together creatives whose practices deliberately blur the conventional boundaries between art, architecture, craft, and design. Featuring painting, sculpture, furniture, jewellery, and handcrafted objects, the show examines how making itself can become a universal language while challenging traditional distinctions between functional and artistic production. The exhibition will be open to the public until 31 July 2026.
6. Resolutions: Celebrating 15 years of Mathaf
To celebrate its fifteenth anniversary, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art presents Resolutions: Celebrating 15 years, an extensive exhibition running through 8 August 2026. It revisits Mathaf’s founding vision while reflecting on the institution’s development over the past decade and a half. The exhibition draws on the museum’s permanent collection of modern and contemporary Arab art and highlights the institution’s evolving curatorial approach, research initiatives, and longstanding collaborations. One will be able to attend the show until 8 August 2026.
7. Summer Collective: Tangerine Dreams
On view at Ayyam Gallery from 8 July to 18 September 2026, Summer Collective: Tangerine Dreams displays works by thirteen artists united by a single visual thread: the colour orange. Vibrant, contemplative, nostalgic, and energetic in equal measure, orange becomes the conceptual anchor for explorations of memory, landscape, identity, and transformation. Across diverse mediums, the exhibition demonstrates the remarkable emotional and symbolic range of a single colour.
8. Interwoven
Until November 2026, House of Arts at Expo City Dubai is hosting Interwoven, a group exhibition inspired by sadu, the traditional weaving practice of Bedouin women across the Arabian Peninsula. The exhibition does not present sadu as a historical artefact: it approaches it as a creative methodology. Twenty artists from the Gulf and the wider Arab world, including Najat Makki and Khalid Al Banna, reinterpret the principles of weaving through painting, sculpture, installation, and mixed media, extending the concept far beyond textiles.
9. Photographic Encounters along the Gulf Coasts
This permanent exhibition at the Sharjah Art Foundation showcases 165 historical photographs and archival documents that date from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawn from the collection of His Highness Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, the exhibition offers a rich visual history of the Arabian Gulf and its wider maritime networks, revealing the region’s social, cultural, and commercial connections through rarely seen archival material.
10. Honour the Past, To Celebrate the Future: Qatar’s Educational Vision
Also on permanent display, Honour the Past, To Celebrate the Future: Qatar’s Educational Vision is presented at Liwan Design Studios and Labs in Msheireb Downtown Doha. Through archival photos, historical documents, recorded testimonies, and interactive mediums, the exhibition chronicles the development of women’s education in Qatar. Particular attention is given to the country’s first girls’ school, later known as Umm Almo’meen Primary School, whose legacy continues to shape Qatar’s educational and social landscape today.
You might also be interested in visiting Five Painters, a group show at Taymour Grahne Projects, and In A Group Picture by Inass Yassin.
