This week’s exhibitions explore movement, material, and transformation. From contemporary reflections on navigation and place to meditations on memory, light, and belonging, these exhibitions examine how artists map the world through objects, landscapes, and lived experience, revealing new ways of seeing the spaces we inhabit.
Global Positioning System
Jameel Arts Centre
Bringing together more than 40 artists, Global Positioning System examines how maps, navigation, and infrastructure shape the way we move through and understand the world. Spanning installation, film, research-based practice, and conceptual art, the exhibition questions ideas of distance, mobility, and progress, while exploring what happens when systems of orientation fail. Rather than treating navigation as a purely technological process, the works consider memory, displacement, and geography as lived experiences, suggesting that movement is as much about imagination and storytelling as it is about reaching a destination. On view until 4 October.
Monday – Sunday, 10am – 8pm, Friday, 12pm – 8pm
Spectra
Leila Heller Gallery
Bringing together an international group of artists and designers, Spectra explores transformation through material, light, and perception. Spanning glass, porcelain, painting, sculpture, and collectible design, the exhibition considers how surfaces shift, reflect, and evolve through changing conditions. Historical works by Pierre Bonnard, Claude Pissarro, Édouard Vuillard, and Henri Matisse are presented alongside contemporary practices, creating a dialogue across portraiture, landscape, and still life that highlights the enduring relationship between light, form, and material.
Monday – Sunday, 10am – 7pm Monday to Friday, 11am – 7pm Saturday and Sunday
Unflowered
Khawla Art Gallery
Unflowered reflects on transformation through stillness rather than growth, exploring the space between potential and becoming. Through layered textures and restrained compositions, the exhibition considers vulnerability, silence, and the quiet strength of what remains unseen. Petals never fully open, forms emerge only to recede, and incompleteness is treated not as failure but as a state of possibility. Rather than celebrating constant progress, the works honour pause, protection, and the unseen processes that shape change before it becomes visible.
Monday – Friday, 10am – 10pm
Same Air
Tabari Artspace
The exhibition features 14 artists connected to the Gulf, presenting works created in response to a shared moment of uncertainty. Produced without a prescribed theme, the paintings, installations, and mixed-media works remain intentionally unfinished, reflecting the instability of the conditions in which they were made. Rather than offering a unified narrative, the exhibition foregrounds individual responses to a collective experience. Together, the works become a living record of how artists absorb, process, and give form to moments of disruption while inhabiting the same place and time.
Monday – Friday, 10am – 6pm
Who I Become
Maraya Art Centre
In this solo exhibition, Salmah Al Mansoori explores memory, material, and place through a practice rooted in collecting, making, and transformation. Drawing on everyday fragments, desert grasses, palm fibres, and natural pigments, her works reimagine overlooked materials as carriers of personal and collective histories. Spanning handmade paper, sculpture, and installation, the exhibition considers memory as something continually reshaped rather than preserved, inviting viewers to reflect on belonging, inheritance, and the evolving relationship between landscape and identity.
Saturday – Thursday: 10:00 am – 7:00 pm, Friday: 4:00 pm – 7:00 pm