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. [...]
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Jorge Tacla, Time the Destroyer Is Time the Preserver - Sharjah Art Foundation, 8 February - 7 June 2026
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.
