Forests, visual history and memory: Where to be this weekend in the Middle East

L'Orient-Le Jour

31-07-2025

When every weekend blurs into a never-ending scroll of flyers, exhibitions and underground gigs, having too many options can feel a lot like having none. This is why every Thursday, L'Orient Today, in partnership with The MYM Agenda, is going to guide you through cultural happenings across the Middle East that are actually worth your time.
Consider this your weekly shortcut to what matters in the region's buzzing cultural scene.
Lebanon is celebrating its favorite season — summer — with its ruthless heat and overcrowded roads. If you caught last week's selections, you'll know Beirut's art scene is making the best of it, oversaturating its galleries and museums with bright colors and "biting and bold commentary" dissecting this controversial season. And if you still haven't found what you were looking for, here are two more picks to add to your agenda:
Displaying 80 artworks from Phillipe Jaber's collection, the Nuhad Es-Said pavilion of the National Museum is retelling Lebanon's cultural history — through travel and film posters.
Impressions of Paradise shows how these advertisements between the 1920s and 70s shaped Lebanon's image both locally and internationally. If you're curious to know what made tourists want to visit us back then and what our cinemas and airports looked like, without having to stuff your nose in a textbook, this exhibition is for you. It's a look into a pre-Civil War country, told through snapshots of everyday life.
If you love a Lebanese summer but hate the heat, you can head to Art Scene Gallery in Gemmayzeh to soak in its colors and energy inside an air-conditioned space. Until the end of the month, the gallery is showing Endless Summer, a collective exhibition of local and regional artists who've taken the vibrant season as their muse, specifically the light and freedom it offers.
If you're one of the rare Lebanese expats who weren't able to escape the UAE this month, or had to cut your trip short due to our lack of matcha raves, worry not, the space right down your street might have what you're looking for:
The Louvre, Abu Dhabi, is offering special summer events where you'll be sure to find something to suit your fancy. The museum is showing the same caliber of timeless art you're used to, while offering astronomy and art camps and classes for you and your little ones.
Looking for something a bit more active?
Take a kayak ride or a private catamaran cruise across the premises, or book your own private photography session for your most artsy Instagram post yet.
For more information, click here.
"Everyman's Mountain," the debut solo show by Emirati artist and designer Omar al-Gurg, showing in Lawrie Shabibi Gallery in al-Quoz, takes you on a visual journey through Mount Kilimanjaro's rarely-seen ecological zones.
The mountain's forests are usually seen as reclusive, a space that no one enters or exits from, but Gurg chooses to depict it with intimacy and detail, and to see the mountain not as a conquest, but as a living, breathing world.
For more information, click here.
Printed Nostalgia at Fire Station, Doha, is bringing back print. It features a staggering (record-breaking, I assume) 98 artists from around the world — chosen from over 300 submissions — as it builds a space to reflect on architecture, migration, culture and everyday life, turning personal experiences into shared visual stories.
Through photography, collage, painting, illustration, and text, digital expressions are reimagined as tactile prints. The space invites you to join the artists in choosing a point in time in your memories, and allowing it to live its own visual life.
Artist Samer Hourani displays Between Confession and Silence at the Orient Gallery in Amman, a series of painted portraits as dramatic as the title suggests. The biggest window into someone's personality is their face, its expressions and eyes, and Hourani takes you through the catalog of characters — and their associated emotions — that marked his life.