From a new generation of Moroccan artists drawing imaginary worlds in Casablanca to Dia al-Azzawi revealing a more intimate side of his practice in Geneva, this autumn’s exhibitions offer a compelling portrait of Arab art across generations and geographies. Moving between memory and mythology, the body and the landscape, personal histories and collective ones, these are the shows to seek out this season.
Franco-Algerian artist Katia Kameli has long been interested in what happens to stories as they travel: how they are translated, altered and passed from one culture or generation to another. In The Canticle of the Birds, at Taymour Grahne Projects, she turns to the celebrated Persian literary text The Conference of the Birds, creating a world of painted silk, sound and moving image. Rather than simply illustrating an ancient tale, Kameli uses it as living material, asking what inherited stories can still tell us about belonging, transformation and our search for meaning today.
Two particularly compelling female voices meet within Afterglow at Frieze Cork Street. Emirati artist Maitha Abdalla draws upon folklore, childhood memories and stories inherited from her grandmother to populate her work with strange, sometimes unsettling hybrid figures. Desire, femininity, fear and social constraint coexist within her deeply psychological universe. Syrian artist Randa Maddah, born in the occupied Golan Heights, approaches landscape differently: land, gardens, absence and the possibility of return become vessels for memory. Together, their works remind us that geography is never simply geography , it can also be inheritance, wound and imagined home.
At Fann À Porter, Lebanese artists Lynn Issa and Yara Chaalan turn towards the body, memory and belonging. Issa’s Sacred Mothers of the Earth interrogates representations of motherhood and the female body, while Chaalan allows bodies and landscapes to merge, carrying traces of Lebanon into compositions shaped as much by longing as by place. Their practices feel particularly resonant at a moment when a younger generation of Arab women is reclaiming the right to represent its own bodies, histories and emotional landscapes.
There is something almost obsessive about Issam Fariane’s drawings. After three months at Yasmine Laraqui Studio & Casablanca Residency, the 1998-born Moroccan artist opens his studio for La Fable du Serpent, an ongoing body of intricate ink works begun in 2023. Animals, knights, machines and hidden signs crowd fictional medieval worlds whose apparent distance from the present is deceptive. Beneath their mythology lie questions of power, conflict and contemporary political and social tension. Fariane never provides the key to his fable. Instead, the eye wanders through clues and recurring figures, forced to construct its own narrative. It is an exciting glimpse at a young Moroccan artist developing a visual language entirely his own.
One of the towering figures of modern Arab art reveals an unexpectedly intimate register at La Galerie 38 Geneva. The Moroccan gallery, founded by Fihr Kettani and committed to bringing artists from the region into an international conversation, presents previously unseen recent paintings by Iraqi master Dia al-Azzawi. Inner Worlds turns towards domestic space , furniture, objects, relationships, colour and memory , while Under Open Skies ventures into gardens and landscapes, from Marrakech’s Jardin Majorelle to the mountains of Lebanon. At 87, al-Azzawi remains wonderfully alive to colour and reinvention. Here, the political and historical weight so often associated with his work gives way to something quieter: the home and garden as repositories of memory, and beauty itself as a way of inhabiting the world.
At Mathaf, the story expands from one artist to a movement that transformed modern Arab visual culture. Revisiting the experiments and legacy of the Baghdad Modern Art Group, the exhibition returns to a generation that sought neither to imitate Western modernism nor retreat into heritage, but to invent a language capable of holding both. Painting, sculpture and archival material trace a radical moment in Iraqi art whose influence continues to reverberate through contemporary practice across the region.
Few subjects bring together fashion, gender, family, ritual and social history quite like the wedding. At the Institut du monde arabe in Paris, Vive la mariée ! looks across Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia to examine bridal traditions as living cultural forms rather than frozen folklore. Dress, jewellery, ceremony and transmission become ways of reading changing societies and particularly the place women occupy within them.
