Every season has its own artistic temperature. This spring, across museums and art spaces connected to the Middle East and its diasporas, a quiet thread seems to emerge. Artists are turning toward what endures. The gestures that survive generations, the stories that travel orally across landscapes, the monuments that hold both memory and contradiction.
Rather than spectacle, many of this season’s most compelling exhibitions embrace a slower form of attention. They listen to archives, to craft traditions, to historical narratives that are constantly being rewritten. From the mythic storytelling of Palestinian artist Jumana Emil Abboud to the monumental weaving of memory by Moroccan multidisciplinary artist Amina Agueznay, and the operatic historical reconstructions of Egyptian filmmaker and visual artist Wael Shawky, these exhibitions move between past and present with a rare sense of depth.
Together, they sketch a portrait of a region where art continues to act as both witness and storyteller.
With The Storyteller and the Obedient Tide, Palestinian artist Jumana Emil Abboud transforms the galleries of Jameel Arts Centre into a landscape shaped by myth and memory. Abboud’s practice has long drawn from the oral traditions of the Levant, weaving folklore, personal narratives and fragments of collective imagination into delicate drawings and immersive installations.
Here, the exhibition unfolds like a story whispered across generations. Figures emerge and dissolve, landscapes drift between dream and geography, and the works seem to breathe with the cadence of the tales that inspired them. In Jumana Emil Abboud’s universe, storytelling is not an act of preservation alone. It is a way of continuously reimagining the present.
At the Sharjah Art Foundation, Chilean painter Jorge Tacla presents a body of work that feels almost archaeological in its intensity. His monumental canvases depict buildings suspended between collapse and reconstruction, structures scarred by time and history.
Jorge Tacla’s paintings are not depictions of ruins in the romantic sense. They are portraits of architecture after the violence of history has passed through it. Layers of pigment evoke dust, erosion and disappearance, yet the works retain a strange stillness, as if these fragile structures were still holding their breath. In the artist’s hands, architecture becomes a witness.
Egyptian artist and filmmaker Wael Shawky has built an extraordinary body of work exploring the theatrical dimension of history. With Drama 1882, first unveiled at the Egyptian Pavilion of the 2024 Venice Biennale, he revisits the Urabi Revolution through an ambitious operatic film installation.
Filmed in a historic theatre in Alexandria and performed entirely in classical Arabic, the work gathers more than 150 performers across eight elaborately choreographed scenes. Costumes shimmer, painted backdrops unfold like tableaux, and the film moves between spectacle and historical reflection. Yet beneath the visual richness lies a more complex question that runs through much of Wael Shawky’s work. Who tells the story of history, and from which point of view?
At the 61st Venice Biennale, Moroccan multidisciplinary artist Amina Agueznay presents Asǝṭṭa, a monumental installation curated by Meriem Berrada. The title refers to a ritual Amazigh weaving practice, and the project unfolds as a meditation on transmission. Drawing on Moroccan craft traditions, particularly weaving and fibre work, Amina Agueznay creates a sculptural environment that reflects on the symbolic threshold known as the Âatba, the space between interior and exterior in traditional Moroccan architecture.
Originally trained as an architect, the Casablanca-born artist approaches installation as an inhabitable space. Her work often emerges from long collaborations with artisans across Morocco, from weavers and embroiderers to basket makers and jewellers. Each gesture becomes part of a larger choreography of knowledge passed from one generation to another. At Venice, these gestures expand into a monumental landscape of fibre and form, transforming the pavilion into a living archive of craft, memory and shared knowledge.
Taken together, these exhibitions reveal a striking convergence of concerns. Across different geographies and artistic languages, the works return to similar questions. How are histories transmitted? What gestures survive across generations? And who ultimately decides which stories endure? From the mythic landscapes of Jumana Emil Abboud to the operatic reconstructions of Wael Shawky, from Amina Agueznay’s monumental weaving of craft traditions to Abdulnasser Gharem’s interrogation of monuments, each exhibition proposes its own answer.
What emerges is a portrait of a region where contemporary art continues to engage deeply with the past, not as nostalgia but as material. A living archive through which artists imagine new narratives for the present.
