From major museum retrospectives to intimate gallery shows, this week’s exhibitions move between history and the everyday. Together, they trace how art responds to change, memory, identity, and desire, across generations, geographies, and vastly different scales of making.
Motherhood: An Art and Photography Exhibition
Kutubna Cultural Center
Bringing together artists and photographers from across 18 countries, this exhibition offers an intimate, multi-perspective look at motherhood as lived experience. Through painting and photography, the works move between tenderness and resilience, private moments and inherited rituals. Gulf traditions sit alongside global narratives, revealing how culture and community shape maternal identity while leaving space for individual expression. Featuring 20 artworks by 17 artists and 33 photographic works by 12 photographers, the exhibition reads as a collective portrait that spans generations and geographies, without flattening the deeply personal nature of the subject. On view until 12 January.
10 am - 10 pm every day of the week including weekends.
Leda Catunda: I like to like what others are liking
Sharjah Art Foundation
This major monographic exhibition marks Brazilian artist Leda Catunda’s largest presentation outside Brazil to date, bringing together works from the 1980s to the present. Drawing on visual and material excess, Catunda’s practice moves between painting, sculpture, and installation, blurring the handmade and the mass-produced. Domestic fabrics, pop imagery, and sculptural abstraction collide in works that critique consumption while remaining sensuous and playful. Curated by Hoor Al Qasimi with Meera Madhu, the exhibition traces four decades of wit, pleasure, and aesthetic inquiry. On view until 8 February.
9:00am – 9:00pm, Saturday – Thursday; Friday, 4:00pm – 9:00pm
Observers of Change: Art from the UAE (1971–2025)
Etihad Museum
Presented by Dubai Culture in collaboration with the Barjeel Art Foundation, this major retrospective surveys more than five decades of artistic practice in the UAE. Drawing on over 70 works from the Barjeel collection, the exhibition brings together pioneering and contemporary artists who have lived and worked in the country since 1971. Spanning painting, photography, sculpture, installation, and mixed media, the show traces parallel shifts in artistic language and national identity. Emirati artists appear alongside voices from across the Arab world, creating a layered, cross-generational portrait of cultural change. On view until 30 June 2026.
10am - 8pm, daily; last entry 7pm
Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim: Two Clouds in the Night Sky
Cultural Foundation
This solo exhibition is a celebration of the practice of Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, a pioneering figure in the development of contemporary art in the UAE. The exhibition traces Ibrahim’s process-driven approach, shaped by repetition, intuition, and close attention to the natural landscape of Khor Fakkan. Working across drawing, sculpture, and installation, his work resists spectacle in favour of quiet accumulation. The result is a contemplative exhibition that foregrounds time, material, and sustained looking. On view until 22 February.
9am - 8pm, Saturday - Thursday; 2pm to 8pm, Friday
Mamluks: Legacy of an Empire
Louvre Abu Dhabi
Developed in collaboration with the Musée du Louvre, this ambitious exhibition revisits one of the Islamic world’s most influential dynasties. Spanning more than two and a half centuries, the Mamluks shaped the region as rulers, diplomats, patrons, and participants in global trade. Drawing together over 250 works, from manuscripts and calligraphy to metalwork, ceramics, and textiles, the exhibition traces a period of artistic and intellectual intensity. Rather than focusing only on power, it foregrounds craftsmanship, exchange, and the cultural legacy that continues to shape visual traditions today. On view until 25 January.
10am - 6:30pm, Tuesday - Thursday: 10am - 8:30pm, Friday - Sunday: