Beyond Borders: An Autumn Journey Through Arab Art

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A home, a garden, a mythical creature, a wedding dress: each can hold a history larger than itself. Across this autumn’s Arab art exhibitions, familiar subjects become starting points for questions about identity, power and the places we carry with us.

For Bestin Magazine’s seasonal selection, the journey begins in Dubai, moves through emerging and established practices, and ends with two exhibitions examining collective cultural memory.

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Dubai: Stories Passed Down, Perspectives Reclaimed

Katia Kameli at Taymour Grahne Projects

The Canticle of the Birds

What survives when a story crosses languages, borders and centuries? Franco-Algerian artist Katia Kameli approaches this question through an encounter with the Persian literary work The Conference of the Birds.

Combining painted silk, sound and moving image, Kameli gives the text a new physical and sensory presence. Her interest lies in the possibilities of interpretation: how an inherited narrative can acquire different meanings for different audiences. The exhibition connects an enduring literary journey with contemporary questions about transformation and belonging.

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Lynn Issa and Yara Chaalan at Fann À Porter

Artist Residency Exhibition

Lebanese artists Lynn Issa and Yara Chaalan bring distinct approaches to the relationship between bodies, memory and place.

In Issa’s Sacred Mothers of the Earth, motherhood and representations of the female body become subjects for examination. Chaalan’s compositions bring bodily forms into conversation with landscapes, drawing on connections to Lebanon and the emotional experience of belonging.

Presented together, their work opens a space for considering who shapes these images—and how artists can revisit the stories attached to them.

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Casablanca: Entering an Unfamiliar World

Issam Fariane at Yasmine Laraqui Studio & Casablanca Residency

La Fable du Serpent

Issam Fariane’s intricate ink drawings reward a patient eye. Knights, animals, mechanical forms and elusive symbols inhabit imagined medieval settings, creating scenes that resist a single explanation.

Developed since 2023, La Fable du Serpent is presented through an open studio following the Moroccan artist’s three-month residency. Its fictional worlds offer room to consider contemporary tensions around conflict and power, without fixing their meaning in place.

Recurring figures and visual clues invite visitors to make connections of their own. The pleasure is in looking closely—and discovering how much remains unresolved.

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London: The Emotional Geography of Home

Maitha Abdalla and Randa Maddah at Frieze Cork Street

Afterglow: From the Residue of a Departed Sun

Memory takes different forms in the work of Emirati artist Maitha Abdalla and Syrian artist Randa Maddah.

Abdalla draws on folklore, childhood experiences and stories passed down by her grandmother. Her hybrid figures inhabit a psychologically charged world where femininity, desire and fear intersect with social expectations.

For Maddah, who was born in the occupied Golan Heights, landscape carries questions of absence and return. Gardens and land become ways to approach the relationship between a place and those who remember it.

Their shared presentation brings these perspectives into dialogue, exploring how personal histories shape both imagined worlds and understandings of home.

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Geneva: An Intimate View of a Modern Master

Dia al-Azzawi at La Galerie 38 Geneva

Inner Worlds, Under Open Skies

Recent, previously unseen paintings by Iraqi artist Dia al-Azzawi bring domestic interiors and outdoor spaces into focus.

In Inner Worlds, furniture, objects and relationships provide material for explorations of colour and memory. Under Open Skies extends that attention to gardens and landscapes, including Marrakech’s Jardin Majorelle and the mountains of Lebanon.

The exhibition offers an opportunity to spend time with a quieter register of al-Azzawi’s practice, where everyday surroundings become rich subjects in their own right.

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Doha and Paris: Revisiting Collective Memory

At Mathaf, Doha

What Lingers in the Artist’s Mind: The Experiments and Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group

Mathaf shifts the focus from individual practices to a movement central to the development of modern Iraqi art.

Through paintings, sculpture and archival material, the exhibition examines how the Baghdad Modern Art Group brought artistic experimentation into conversation with local cultural heritage. It considers the language these artists developed and the legacy of their approach across the region.

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At the Institut du monde arabe, Paris

Vive la mariée! Algérie, Maroc, Tunisie

Bridal traditions offer a meeting point for clothing, craftsmanship, family life and social change.

Looking across Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, Vive la mariée! explores wedding dress, jewellery and ceremony as cultural practices that evolve through transmission. These objects and rituals provide a lens on changing societies, with particular attention to women’s place within them.

It is a fitting final stop on an autumn itinerary concerned with inheritance: what is preserved, what is reinterpreted, and what each generation makes its own.

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