Kutubna Cultural Center, Dubai’s newest independent bookstore and cultural hub, is set to present a Collage Art Exhibition, opening on Saturday, May 16, 2026 at 6 pm and running through Monday, August 31, 2026. The exhibition features a diverse group of artists from 26 countries, showcasing over 70 artworks created in both physical and digital mediums. These works explore themes such as memory, identity, migration, belonging, resilience, spirituality, culture, environment, and tradition versus modernity.
Highly inventive and expressive, collage was founded on the principle of integrating diverse materials, images, and concepts to produce original compositions. Pioneered by figures such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the medium rapidly developed into a sophisticated artistic language, further advanced by artists including Hannah Höch and Max Ernst, and later reinterpreted in the dynamic cut-outs of Henri Matisse. This exhibition offers a unique occasion to examine contemporary collage in the UAE and beyond.
This exhibition brings together Mariam bin Hammad, an Emirati artist who creates meaningful artworks using symbols from UAE culture, expressing a deep connection between people, nature, and spirituality, as seen in Rooted Butterfly; Batool Khalifa, an Egyptian artist using paper collage to build layered visual narratives, including Tales from Rasheed Harbour, shaped by her documentation of the harbour and reflecting on coastal life and cultural continuity; Mohammad Danyal Zaheer (Afghanistan), whose work Home reflects on memory, displacement, and belonging, exploring the emotional and spiritual dimensions of returning to, losing, and reimagining home; and Vera Volodina (Russia), presenting the digital work The Sky Within, which explores reconciliation and conveys that peace is no longer sought externally—it unfolds from within.
Artists also include Alberto de Blobs, a Barcelona-based graffiti writer, painter, and mural artist; Hiyam Salman, who creates richly layered works by attaching textile scraps and other recycled materials onto surfaces such as canvas, wood, and cardboard; Nayyab Akram, who builds painterly compositions by carefully cutting and layering tiny fragments from printed media, transforming discarded images into cohesive visual forms; and Daniela Godoy-Waheed, who integrates traditional marbling techniques—Turkish Ebru and Japanese Suminagashi—with collage, archival materials, and botanical elements. Also featured are Stacey Kalkowski (United States) and Shloka Shankar (India), who collaborate on digital collages—Desire and Foresight—developed through a call-and-response process in which one initiates an image and the other responds with new elements, creating an evolving visual dialogue that incorporates text fragments and quotes from various authors.
It further presents Between Spaces, a collaborative video by Swiss-based artists, Nicole Henning and Alexandra Carambellas, which documents the creation of large-scale wall collages. Using photography, installation, and spatial composition, the artists employ layering and collage to explore the fluid boundaries of fiction/reality and memory/place, turning the making process into a performative narrative across surfaces.
Curated by Nora Qudah, the Collage Art exhibition opens on May 16, 2026 at 6 pm, and will be on view until August 31, 2026, at Kutubna Cultural Center.