With galleries, theatres and cultural spaces active through the heat, an industry veteran says the UAE creative sector has finally grown up.
- The UAE arts scene is now active year-round with no meaningful summer slowdown in 2026.
- Global Positioning System at Jameel Arts Centre and Body Quotidian at Sharjah Art Foundation are unmissable.
- Short+Sweet Dubai is preparing three festival editions and the second DXB Theatre Awards this summer.
- Most UAE cultural experiences this summer are free or low cost and require no specialist knowledge.
Not long ago, a question about the UAE arts and culture scene in July would have been answered with a polite redirect toward October. Summer was when the galleries went quiet, the performance companies paused, and the cultural conversation moved elsewhere. This summer, Dubai Culture and its partners are presenting major exhibitions, workshops, library camps, and cultural programmes across the city throughout July and August, reflecting a shift that people who have been building the UAE’s creative sector from the inside have been working toward for years. The off-season no longer exists. And according to one of the UAE’s most experienced performing arts producers, that absence is the most significant cultural milestone this region has reached in a generation.
Alex Broun, Executive Producer, Short+Sweet Dubai
Alex Broun has spent 25 years producing Short+Sweet Festivals across the world and 14 of those years working specifically within the UAE’s performing arts sector. His perspective on what this summer represents carries the weight of someone who has lived through both the quiet seasons and the gradual, patient building of something more permanent.
“What feels particularly exciting about the UAE’s arts and culture scene this summer is that it no longer feels like an off-season,” he says. “In previous years, cultural activity often slowed considerably once the heat arrived. This year, there is a genuine sense of continuity, with galleries, independent organisations, cinemas and performance companies remaining active throughout July and August.” For Broun, that continuity is not incidental. It is the clearest evidence yet that the UAE is developing what he calls a more mature, homegrown ecosystem, one that supports UAE-based artists, creates opportunities for local audiences, and encourages people not just to watch but to participate and create.
His own summer reflects exactly that productive intensity. Broun is currently producing The Jury Experience for Fever while simultaneously preparing the next editions of Short+Sweet Theatre, Short+Sweet Comedy, and Short+Sweet Improv, as well as the second edition of the DXB Theatre Awards. The visible, audience-facing side of the UAE arts calendar, the festivals and major performances that fill the cooler months, rests on an enormous amount of invisible summer work. “While audiences may associate the cooler months with festivals and major performances, summer is when an enormous amount of writing, planning, casting and creative development takes place,” he explains. The heat is not slowing the sector down. It is where the next season is being built.
His recommendations for what to see right now are specific and enthusiastic. Global Positioning System at Jameel Arts Centre, running until October 4, brings together a genuinely international group of artists whose work sits between cultures rather than belonging exclusively to one, which Broun identifies as a defining quality of the most interesting art being produced in the UAE today. Body Quotidian at Sharjah Art Foundation, placing recent works by Laila Majid and Inaam Zafar in dialogue, explores the human body amid changing ideas of youth, beauty and technology in ways that Broun finds particularly resonant given the broader cultural conversations happening across the region right now. Dubai Culture’s Summer Cinema programme at the same institution brings together film, conversation and community in a format that makes the arts genuinely social rather than solitary, which he sees as central to how the UAE’s cultural sector needs to grow.
What makes the UAE distinctive, Broun argues, is a quality that is difficult to manufacture and impossible to import: the specific way its artists draw upon the Gulf’s landscapes, languages, heritage, and extraordinary community mix to create work that could only have come from here. “The most interesting work being created here often exists between cultures rather than belonging exclusively to one,” he observes. “It reflects the UAE as it is actually lived.” This quality is visible in the summer’s exhibition programme, from Juma Al Haj’s work at Iris Projects, which processes fear and disruption through layered painting and fragmented text, to the broader group exhibitions reflecting on what it means to live, observe and create within the UAE right now.
His final point is perhaps his most urgent, and it is addressed directly to the residents who walk past gallery doors every week without going in. “I wish more residents realised how accessible this cultural activity is,” he says. “You don’t need specialist knowledge to visit a gallery, attend an independent film, join a workshop or watch a locally produced performance. Much of it is free or inexpensive.” Dubai Culture is presenting workshops, library camps, museum activities, and exhibitions across the city this summer, many of them completely free of charge, removing every barrier except the willingness to show up. Broun’s advice for anyone who has been meaning to engage with the UAE’s arts scene but has not yet found the right moment is simple and direct. “Choose something unfamiliar and go. Culture becomes meaningful through curiosity, not expertise.”
The UAE’s summer arts scene is not a consolation prize for residents who could not travel abroad. It is a genuine cultural offering from a region that is finally telling its own stories, in its own galleries, on its own stages, in its own voice. Broun’s advice stands: choose something unfamiliar and go. Culture has never been more accessible in this city, and the only thing standing between most UAE residents and a genuinely enriching summer is the assumption that there is nothing worth seeing. There is plenty. It just needs an audience willing to show up!
For more on Alex Broun’s work visit alexbroun.online.
