Middle East and Africa Art Exhibitions

Summer 2026

Across the Middle East and Africa this season, institutions are less concerned with presenting a unified narrative than with examining how cultural memory is constructed, preserved, and reinterpreted. Historical figures and contemporary voices coexist across the region, creating a landscape shaped by dialogue between past and present rather than by any single dominant theme.

In Sharjah, Body Quotidian brings together the practices of Laila Majid and Inaam Zafar through questions of material experience and everyday life, reflecting the Foundation’s long-standing commitment to transregional perspectives. In Istanbul, Panorama: Dreams and Places surveys contemporary photographic practice, while Semiha Berksoy reaffirms the importance of historical figures whose work continues to shape cultural narratives across disciplines.

Southern Africa offers some of the season’s most compelling propositions. Portia Zvavahera‘s psychologically charged paintings explore interior worlds through contemporary visual language, while Spring Is Rebellious revisits the life and legacy of Albie Sachs, positioning art within broader histories of resistance, memory, and social transformation.

Taken together, these exhibitions reveal a region defined not by cohesion but by multiple approaches to interpretation: personal and collective memory, historical inheritance and contemporary experience, local context and international exchange. The result is a cultural landscape in which institutions play an increasingly active role in shaping how art histories are written and understood.