Art Dubai Week’s programming this April is as dynamic, diverse and globally relevant as ever. Partnerships with Dubai Culture, Alserkal Avenue and Art Jameel consistently maintain a deep-rooted connection between Art Dubai and the art community in the city and its cultural origins, bolstered by ambitious programming in Abu Dhabi and Sharjah. Dubai-based arts writer Laura Egerton shares an insider’s guide to the best events and exhibitions across the UAE during Art Dubai 2025.

The widely acclaimed Sharjah Biennial 16 (until 15 June) holds April Acts: to carry new formations from 18-20 April, panel discussions, artist talks, workshops and performances that expanding the Biennial’s programme. to carry showcases a colossal range of practices from the Global South and beyond, with five curators having selected over 300 artworks on display at more than 17 venues from coast to coast and into the desert. Kalba Ice Factory’s facade displays Cold Water (2025) by the New Zealand artist Kate Newby; her work I like the way I am (2023) is in Art Dubai’s Bawwaba section with Galerie Art:Concept (Paris) this year.

New Spaces

Since 2021, Efie Gallery has been an important platform for some of Africa’s most significant artists. Their new 4,400 sq ft space in Alserkal Avenue (from 14 April) opens with the exhibition I am Soil. My Tears are Water, with new works by Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons (until 24 May).

Perrotin will also be opening a new permanent space of 1,100 sq ft in DIFC this April. The gallery was first founded in 1990 and the new spaces joins their global presence in Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong.

Emmanuel Perrotin founded his first gallery in 1990 at the age of twenty-one. He has worked closely with his roster of artists, some for more than twenty-five years, to realise their ambitious projects. Perrotin has multiple galleries across the globe, totaling approximately 7,000 square meters (75,000 square feet) of exhibition space across its nine locations.

In Abu Dhabi, Iris Projects presents Structural Syntax, the Saudi artist Abdullah Al Othman’s first solo exhibition in the UAE (18 April – 27 June) showcasing his ongoing investigations of Arabian urban landscapes and linguistic history. BARÓ Galeria, established in 1999 in São Paulo, launched its newest gallery in Abu Dubai in February after joining the Art Dubai roster in 2024, and will be exhibiting the work of two artists from Pakistan and South Africa at Art Dubai 225.

Across the industrial area of Al Quoz, artists are setting up new group studios. Sima Collective presents the exhibition It Awakens (At Night) The Thought (12-21 April). 8th Street Studios (open studio, 19 April) is home to artists such as Ranim AlHalaky whose installation Eternal Stutters of Memory | Chimes of the City was created for Dubai’s Al Shindagha Museum as part of Sikka Art and Design Festival 2025.

Abu Dhabi

The first Malaysian art exhibition in the Middle East (To Know Malaysia is to Love Malaysia: Highlights from The AFK Collection, until 10 September) is currently on show at Cultural Foundation, Abu Dhabi, alongside the first mid-career retrospective of Emirati artist Maitha Abdulla, Between Metamorphosis and Reality (until 30 August).

Maya Allison is bringing a new concept to NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery with Between the Tides: A Gulf Quinquennial (until 20 April). The exhibition showcases new works produced in the UAE, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and is intended to run every five years.

The two latest exhibitions presented at the UAE Pavilion at the Venice Biennale are on display: Abdullah Al Saadi’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia at 421 (Mina Al Zayed, Abu Dhabi, until 4 May), and Nadia Saikali and Her Contemporaries from the recently opened Barjeel Art Foundation (until 13 July).

The interdisciplinary collective teamLab opens its Phenomena venue on Saadiyat Island on 18 April.

Alserkal Avenue 

Alserkal Avenue is running a week-long programme titled A Wild Stitch (13-20 April), which reflects the multiplicity, hybridity and alternative perspectives that the UAE gathers. The exhibition Vanishing Points: Imran Qureshi at Alserkal’s Concrete venue aims to challenge the notion of the single-point perspective through miniature painting, video, photography and site-specific installation. 

The public commissions Between a Beach and Slope juxtapose words, photographs and sculptures by Nujoom Alghanem and Shilpa Gupta. Gupta is also on show at Ishara Art Foundation (Lines of Flight, until 31 May). Alghanem’s video and sound installation A Passerby Collects the Moonlight is a development of her presentation at the UAE Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019, Passage. 

Galleries exhibiting at Art Dubai are also putting on shows of local artists’ works. Aisha Alabbar Gallery’s A Radical Intimacy of Hanging Out (until 23 May) brings together works by Asma Khoory, Taqwa Al Naqbi and Sultan Al Remeithi, who present alternative perspectives on life in the Gulf for their generation. Gallery Isabelle is exhibiting the late, great Hassan Sharif’s assemblages in a new light in The Storyteller, inspired by the writings of Walter Benjamin (until 30 May). 

From Friday 18 April, Héctor Zamora’s special site-specific intervention, co-commissioned with Art Dubai, will be at Alserkal Avenue. The work is the result of the performance Existence-emitting Movements, an action inspired by global ceramic traditions in which a group of women walk directly on an installation made of hundreds of raw clay vessels in different shapes and sizes.

Dubai as a platform for displaced artists

Jameel Arts Centre is presenting Eltiqa: How to Work Together? (until 20 July), an exhibition curated by The Question of Funding that tells the history of an artist collective founded in Gaza City in 2000. Not There, Yet Felt, Hazem Harb’s third solo exhibition with Tabari Artspace (DIFC, opening during Art Nights, runs 12 April – 27 May), peels back layers of personal memories found within the walls of the Gaza home he cannot return to.

In Alserkal Avenue, Zawyeh Gallery hosts The Promise (13 April – 30 June) by Bashir Makhoul, who reflects on home as both a sanctuary and site of loss. Gulf Photo Plus is showing photographs by Majd Arandas, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in November 2023 (A Memorial in Fragments, 13 April – 13 August), and Grey Noise opens the show On White by Majd Abdel Hamid (15 April – 4 June).

طرس (Tterss, Ayyam Gallery, 15 April – 30 May ) presents Sama Alshaibi’s latest mixed-media collages and video scanning of the neighbourhoods of Baghdad using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology.

At Nika Project Space, in nearby Al Khayat Avenue, A Shroud is a Cloth (until 17 May) by Adrian Pepe, a Honduras-born fibre artist based in Beirut, reflects on the relationship between fabric and broken structures, both natural and man-made.

Public art and the theme of urbanisation 

Analysing the rapidly developing urban fabric in which they live is a prevailing theme for Gulf-based artists. Room for Error at Bayt AlMamzar (until 18 May) blends Nadine Ghandour’s imaginative storytelling with factual observations to create characters who are struggling to adapt to today’s cities.

Dubai’s Al Safa Art and Design Library presents an exhibition focused on Burj Rashid, the iconic World Trade Center tower. The second phase of the inaugural Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial (until 30 April) includes new installations by Rand Abdul Jabbar and Tarik Kiswanson. 

Down along the creek, Al Fahidi Historical District “traces Dubai’s humble origins” as architect Ahmed Bukhash states. Beginning as a modest trading port “this enclave embodies the concept of ‘ordered chaos’ with its protruding wind towers, bustling markets and serene courtyards while offering visitors an immersive and unforgettable journey through Dubai’s rich heritage.”