What's On: Your Ultimate Guide to Abu Dhabi Art Week 2025

By Global Art Daily Editorial Board

_{Published on November 18, 2025}

Abu Dhabi Art Week 2025 is set to be historic. With the recent news of Frieze’s arrival in Abu Dhabi, paired with the anticipated museum openings this Fall 2025, including Zayed National Museum on Saadiyat Cultural District and Al Ain Museum, all eyes are on the capital of the United Arab Emirates this week.

The previous Terminal 1 of Abu Dhabi’s Zayed International Airport, designed in the late 1970s by Paul Andreu. Photo courtesy of Nomad.

We have rounded up all the exhibitions, festivals, and art fairs happening in parallel to Abu Dhabi Art 2025. The 17th edition of the fair opens with an exclusive Patron’s Preview on November 18th and closes its doors on November 23rd.

NOMAD, a new art fair in the magnificent Abu Dhabi Terminal 1 Airport – a monument of tilework and 1980s architecture, the second edition of the light art festival Manar Abu Dhabi, and a massive group show of UAE-based artists at 421 are amongst our must-sees.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Sharjah, a myriad of gallery shows are opening doors, showcasing the thriving, diverse, independent youth-driven art scene of the Emirates. “Mirage”, a group show by Thaer Select, curated by Vertygo, opens November 20th in the heritage building of Ethr Hotel (a previous recreational space for officers of the UAE Armed Forces, built by the late H.H. Sheikh Zayed Al Nahyan in 1983). Also opening are a series of solo exhibitions by some of the key artists who call the Emirates home: Christopher Joshua Benton at Baró Galeria Abu Dhabi, Rami Farook at Qanazea Gallery, Miramar Al Nayyar at Tabari Art Space’s new space on Alserkal Avenue, and Aliyah AlAwadhi for Hunna Art Gallery at Bayt AlMamzar, amongst many others.

📍️ Abu Dhabi

Abu Dhabi Art

19 - 23 November 2025
Manarat Al Saadiyat, Saadiyat Island

The 17th edition of the fair returns, ahead of its Frieze Abu Dhabi debut, with 140 participating galleries.

Must-see booths are: ATHR Gallery presenting Mohammed Alfaraj in partnership with Mennour, alongside a selection of ATHR’s artists: Ayman Yossri, Sultan bin Fahad, Nasser Al Salem, Sara Abdu, and Asma Bahmim; Taymour Grahne showing a selection of GCC contemporary and modern artists, including rising star painter Roudha Al Mazrouei; Carbon12 showing a selection of works including Sara Al Mehairi; and The Third Line showing a selection of works mirroring their 20th anniversary exhibition currently on view on Alserkal Avenue.

Lamya Gargash will present a special edition of her Kun: To Be series at the Community Partners.

A number of international galleries are participating in the fair for the first time. We are particularly excited about Tokyo-based Leesaya in the Special Projects section.

Also not to miss is the Beyond Emerging section, curated by Issam Kourbaj, featuring Alla Abdunabi, Maktoum Al Maktoum, and Salmah Almansoori.

NOMAD Abu Dhabi

19 - 22 November 2025
Old Terminal 1, Zayed International Airport

The NOMAD fair marks its Abu Dhabi debut in the decommissioned Terminal 1, Zayed International Airport — a landmark of regional modernism designed in the late 1970s by Paul Andreu, the celebrated architect of Paris’ Charles de Gaulle. Closed to the public for years, the terminal will be reimagined by NOMAD in partnership with the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi. This edition arrives at a pivotal cultural moment, enriching the UAE’s dynamic arts landscape and resonating with the architectural and artistic spirit of Saadiyat Island, home to one of the world’s most ambitious museum clusters.

More information on access & participating galleries: click here.

Lachlan Turczan, Gateway, 2025. Courtesy Public Art Abu Dhabi, DCT Abu Dhabi.

Manar Abu Dhabi 2025: The Light Compass

Curated by Khai Hori, Alia Zaal Lootah, Munira Al Sayegh, and Mariam Alshehhi
15 November 2025 - 4 January 2026
Jubail Island, Abu Dhabi

Another must-see: Manar Abu Dhabi returns for its second edition on Jubail Island and various other locations throughout the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. We are most excited about Lachlan Turczan premiering his monumental Gateway and Shaikha Al Mazroui’s new Contigent Object installation, both located at Jubail Island, a short drive from Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi.

Organised by the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi (DCT Abu Dhabi), this second edition of Manar Abu Dhabi brings together fifteen Emirati and international artists and collectives from ten countries, presenting twenty-three works including site-specific light sculptures, projections, and immersive installations. The exhibition unfolds across four key locations—Jubail Island, Souq Al Mina, and, for the first time, Al Ain—with dedicated trails at Al Qattara and Al Jimi Oases, highlighting Abu Dhabi’s diverse landscapes and ecosystems. Curated by Khai Hori (Artistic Director) and co-curated by Alia Zaal Lootah, Munira Al Sayegh, and Mariam Alshehhi, The Light Compass invites audiences to engage actively with light as both guide and medium.

YOKOMAE et BOUAYAD, Choreography of a Cloud, Dancing Shadows, 2025. Installation view at the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Photo: Latifa Al Bokhari.

Art Here 2025: Shadows, Richard Mille Art Prize

Curated by Sophie Mayuko Arni

11 October - 28 December 2025
Louvre Abu Dhabi, Saadiyat Island

Louvre Abu Dhabi and Swiss watchmaking brand Richard Mille return for the fifth edition of their groundbreaking annual exhibition and competition, Art Here and the Richard Mille Art Prize, deepening their shared commitment to showcasing contemporary art from the region and beyond within the global creative landscape.

Art Here 2025: Shadows, conceptualised by guest curator Sophie Mayuko Arni, invited artists to respond to the theme 'Shadows', a concept exploring the interplay between light and absence, visibility and concealment, and the layered dimensions of memory, identity, and transformation. Reflecting the richness of regional creativity, this year’s edition welcomed over 400 proposals from artists based in the GCC and Japan, along with artists from the MENA region with a GCC connection.

Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Abu Dhabi Archipelago (Jubail), 2015, Digital Print, 60 x 80 cm. Courtesy of the artist and The Third Line, Dubai

Rays, Ripples, Residue

Curated by Munira Al Sayegh, Murtaza Vali, and Nadine Khalil

1 November 2025 - 26 April 2026
421 Arts Campus, Mina Zayed

Rays, Ripples, Residue explores the lasting impressions, afterimages, and the material residues that have shaped exhibition-making and artistic production in the UAE over the past decade. Since 2015, the local art scene has evolved into a dynamic ecosystem, marked by the rise of artist-led initiatives, expanded institutional support, and growing international visibility through biennales, art fairs, and cultural diplomacy. This period has also witnessed deeper engagement with regional histories, identity, and decolonial narratives, reflected across both institutional and independent platforms. Framed through three curatorial perspectives, the exhibition engages with time as a central theme: Munira Al Sayegh curates a chapter that explores past reverberations while Nadine Khalil considers post-moment hauntings. Murtaza Vali presents enduring critiques of commodification and elemental presence.

Ala Younis: Past of a Temporal Universe

Curated by Maya Allison

NYUAD Art Gallery
September 23, 2025 - January 16, 2026
NYUAD Art Gallery, Saadiyat Island

This exhibition spans the last two decades of Ala Younis’ hybrid practice as an artist-researcher-curator. Her archival installations, textiles, murals, mosaics, and drawings make subtle, startling connections among political, social, urban, and popular imaginaries. Informed by her training in architecture and visual cultures, Younis’ projects center on the physical developments and narrative intersections of the Arab geographies in which she grew up, frequently drawing from a wide range of formal and informal archives. The exhibition will debut a series of new commissions alongside iterations of major past projects. Together, these works trace conceptual and formal throughlines in her work, from the tools and skills she developed as she emerged in the art scene of Amman, Jordan, to her experiments in navigating new knowledge as she evolved the unique methods and perspective for which she is renowned today.

Mirage

Organized by Thaer Select
Curated by Nicolò Venelli/Vertygo

Opens 20 November 2025 – Accessible 24/7
ETHR Hotel Abu Dhabi

Featuring 17 artists from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, broader MENA region, and beyond, this group show promises to be one of the most-talked about parallel exhibitions of this Abu Dhabi Art week. Organized by pop-up show master Thaer Select, and curated by Nicolò Venelli from Vertygo (an art residency program for Arab artists in Nothern Italy), the exhibition takes place in the historic premises of the Ethr Hotel, previously the UAE Armed Forces’s recreational facilities built by the late H.H. Sheikh Zayed in 1983.

Mirage is the illusion that guides and deceives, the image that shimmers at the edge of perception. It is the encounter between what is seen and what is imagined, between the world as it is and the world as it could be. It is the hardship and the challenge of life, and the strength it takes to overcome adversity.

Mirage defines deception: an oasis that does not exist, a vision too distant to reach. It is the birth and rebirth of dreams, the tribal dance that captures the mind. It is the setting of absolute desolation, and yet the caravan lines glimmer in the distance, drawn across a horizon that is but sand dunes and heat. It poses a challenge to the viewer: will you traverse the desert?

Christopher Joshua Benton: The Obligation of the Circle

Baró Galeria Abu Dhabi – O. Contemporary

Opens November 21, 2025
Baró Galeria Abu Dhabi

The Obligation of the Circle, a solo exhibition by Christopher Joshua Benton, presents a new series of Benton’s six tapestries.

The exhibition also includes a selection from his collection of Afghan war carpets and a Community Wall — a large photographic installation accompanied by printed images documenting various interventions that have taken place at the souk. Together, these elements create a dialogue between memory, territory, and collective practice.

Additionally, the project welcomes discursive and process-based contributions from other voices that orbit Benton’s practice, including Marisa Morán Jahn, Faustin Linyekula, and others, whose dialogues with the artist expand the understanding of community. This ecology of collaboration is reflected in the fact that proceeds from the production of the works support Zuleya, a social enterprise dedicated to preserving Afghanistan’s ancient weaving traditions through education, free healthcare, and sustainable employment.

The Imaginary Museum

Rizq Art Initiative
Curated by Murtaza Vali

19 September – 30 November 2025
Leaf Tower, Reem Island

The Imaginary Museum takes inspiration from André Malraux’s concept of a “museum without walls”—a space where artworks live beyond their material form, carried forward through memory, imagination, and interpretation.

The exhibition reconsiders art as a vessel for both personal and collective remembrance, inviting viewers to see artworks not as fixed objects but as fragments of ongoing narratives. Drawing also on Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of hybridity and Umberto Eco’s idea of the “open work,” the show emphasizes fluidity, transformation, and the active role of the viewer in shaping meaning. Through painting, sculpture, digital practices, and material experimentation, participating artists explore how memory, identity, and cultural consciousness are constantly redefined across time and space.

Rami Farook: Self Care

Qanazea Gallery

November 11 – December 23, 2025
Qanazae Gallery, Al Zahiyah

This exhibition brings 37 works on paper from the past 14 years. Using ink, pastel, charcoal, and lead, they move between image & text, instinct & reflection. Paper, here, is not just a support but an intimate, fragile surface where emotion, impulse, and vulnerability left their traces. Most works take their titles from notes that Rami’s written on his bedroom wall- thoughts, prayers, and reminders that merge diary with public statement. Together, they form a self-portrait & social landscape, exploring motivation, protection, fate, faith, and the quiet pursuit of care & balance.

📍️ Dubai

Miramar Al Nayyar | Hujra —حُجرة

Curated by Abeer Seikaly
Tabari Artspace, Alserkal Avenue

November 16 – December 1, 2025

Tabari Art Space, Warehouse 81, Alserkal Avenue

The title Hujra (ﺣُﺟرة) translates as “chamber,” sharing its root with ḥajar (ﺣَﺟَر, stone). For Tabari Art Space’s first exhibition at Alserkal Avenue, the veteran Dubai gallery presents Hujra — ﺣُﺟرة, a solo exhibition by Miramar Al Nayyar, curated by Abeer Seikaly.

In Hujra — ﺣُﺟرة, Al Nayyar traces how flow crystallises onto canvas, how light becomes matter, and how painting absorbs the sound of vision, grounding the process in the rock's enduring presence as both origin and silent witness. The exhibition unfolds as a dialogue between artist and curator, where inner states of consciousness take form through body, material, and space. This presentation marks a new chapter for Tabari Artspace, expanding into Dubai’s contemporary art district and opening space for process-driven and experimental practices alongside its ongoing DIFC programme.

Aliyah AlAwadhi: Girl’s Parts

Presented by Hunna Art Gallery
Bayt AlMamzar

November 15, 2025 – January 4, 2026

Bayt AlMamzar

Childhood is a half-remembered taste: sweet, sticky, and sometimes spoiled. In Girl Parts, Aliyah Alawadhi metabolizes this residue into a language of paint - bodies shimmering in pinks and creams, mouths agape, devouring and dreaming. Her figures - often distorted, gleefully abject, and insistently feminine - move through an interior world that oscillates between the domestic and the fantastical. A kitchen becomes a theatre of appetite; a solarium, a site of gathering and magic. These are not nostalgic visions of innocence but reimaginings of “girl”: an ancient inheritance of edicts around beauty, shame, and desire, rewritten here with magic, rage, and much speculation.

At first glance, her canvases glisten with playfulness: pastel hues, visceral textures, and theatrical bodies caught mid-gesture. But beneath their apparent sweetness lies a reflection on how women learn to inhabit their bodies. Her figures eat, laugh, and comfort one another; they take flight and conjure spells, occupying space, indulging in excess, and refusing composure. Their grotesqueness is a form of release - a way of existing beyond the narrow gaze that defines the “girl body.”

17/11/2026, Editor’s Note: Some exhibitions might be added to the list as the week progresses.

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What's On: Your Ultimate Guide to Abu Dhabi Art Week 2025

📍️ Abu Dhabi

Abu Dhabi Art

19 - 23 November 2025 Manarat Al Saadiyat, Saadiyat Island

NOMAD Abu Dhabi

19 - 22 November 2025 Old Terminal 1, Zayed International Airport

Manar Abu Dhabi 2025: The Light Compass

Curated by Khai Hori, Alia Zaal Lootah, Munira Al Sayegh, and Mariam Alshehhi 15 November 2025 - 4 January 2026 Jubail Island, Abu Dhabi

Art Here 2025: Shadows, Richard Mille Art Prize

Curated by Sophie Mayuko Arni

11 October - 28 December 2025 Louvre Abu Dhabi, Saadiyat Island

Rays, Ripples, Residue

Curated by Munira Al Sayegh, Murtaza Vali, and Nadine Khalil

1 November 2025 - 26 April 2026 421 Arts Campus, Mina Zayed

Ala Younis: Past of a Temporal Universe

Curated by Maya Allison

NYUAD Art Gallery September 23, 2025 - January 16, 2026 NYUAD Art Gallery, Saadiyat Island

Mirage

Organized by Thaer SelectCurated by Nicolò Venelli/Vertygo

Opens 20 November 2025 – Accessible 24/7 ETHR Hotel Abu Dhabi

Christopher Joshua Benton: The Obligation of the Circle

Baró Galeria Abu Dhabi – O. Contemporary

Opens November 21, 2025Baró Galeria Abu Dhabi

The Imaginary Museum

Rizq Art InitiativeCurated by Murtaza Vali

19 September – 30 November 2025 Leaf Tower, Reem Island

Rami Farook: Self Care

Qanazea Gallery

November 11 – December 23, 2025 Qanazae Gallery, Al Zahiyah

📍️ Dubai

Miramar Al Nayyar | Hujra —حُجرة

Curated by Abeer Seikaly Tabari Artspace, Alserkal Avenue

November 16 – December 1, 2025

Tabari Art Space, Warehouse 81, Alserkal Avenue

Aliyah AlAwadhi: Girl’s Parts

Presented by Hunna Art GalleryBayt AlMamzar

November 15, 2025 – January 4, 2026

Bayt AlMamzar

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E-Issue 09 –– RUH/JED
Spring 2025

E-09++
Fall 2025

E-Issue 08 –– SEL
Summer 2024

E-08++
Fall 2024

E-Issue 07 –– AUH
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E-07++
Winter/Spring 2024

E-Issue 06 –– DXB/SHJ
Spring 2023

E-Issue 05 –– VCE
Fall 2022

E-05++
Fall/Winter 2022-23

E-Issue 04 –– IST
Spring 2022

E-04++
Spring/Summer 2022

E-Issue 03 ––TYO
Fall 2021

E-03++
Fall/Winter 2021-22

E-Issue 02 –– NYC
Spring 2021

E-02++
Spring/Summer 2021

E-Issue 01 –– AUH/DXB
Summer 2020

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