Artist's Room: Walid Siti

Jameel Arts Centre opens its new season with Artist's Room: Walid Siti, on view in the galleries from 20 September 2026 to 31 January 2027. The capsule exhibition traces forty years of the Kurdish Iraqi artist's practice, combining works from the Art Jameel Collection, new sculptural commissions and material from the artist's studio, including sketchbooks, maquettes, drawings and paintings.

The show follows Siti's long engagement with the motif of the mountain. In his work, the Centre notes, "architecture imitates mountains, with peaking towers, Mesopotamian ziggurats and Towers of Babel evoking the longstanding human aspiration to go higher at all costs." In turn, he treats mountains as architecture, rebuilding them through models and schematics and imagining impossible sculptures and grand endeavours.

For Siti, who grew up in Duhok in Iraqi Kurdistan, mountains are both a national symbol of Kurdistan and the defining landscape of his childhood. A newly commissioned large-scale sculpture, Into the Mountains, reflects on the troubled history of Kurdistan and its people. It is shown alongside the War Series, an early group of drawings and etchings made in the 1980s during his years of exile and longing through the Iran to Iraq war, gathered here for the first time.

The exhibition is part of Artists' Rooms, the Centre's series of solo shows drawn largely from the Art Jameel Collection and focused on influential artists from West Asia and South Asia, curated in dialogue with each artist. It opens alongside Artist's Rooms devoted to Shezad Dawood and Lulua Alyahya.

Bringing four decades of work into one room, the show offers Dubai audiences a rare chance to see how a single image, the mountain, has carried Siti's thinking about home, borders, migration and memory from the drawings of his early exile to his most recent sculpture.