LUMEN 2026

Matti Sirvio Art Galleria in Qurum opened 'LUMEN 2026' on 2 September 2026. The group exhibition, curated by the artist Anetta Szabo, gathers 14 artists working across painting, sculpture, installation, printmaking and photography.

The show takes light as its organising idea, starting from the fact that the speed of light is a scientific constant. Around that single fixed point, the artists consider change, uncertainty and the gap between what we see and what we understand, so that light becomes, in Muscat Daily's account, 'a way of questioning permanence, uncertainty, and the shifting relationship between what we see and what we understand'.

Omani artists make up much of the line-up, among them Khadija Al Maamari, Majid Al Amri, Sara Al Harrasi, Amal Al Amiri, Faisal Al Abri, Wadhah Al Rashdi and Humaid Al Aufi. They are joined by Muscat-based and regional artists including Dana Al Jouder, Dr Ayman Elsadek Aly El Semar and James Wagstaff, as well as the curator herself.

The exhibition was opened by Amina Nasser Al Balushi, head of the Madad Cultural Salon. In Muscat Daily's report, the art lecturer Ghazaleh Beirami frames it through Hans-Georg Gadamer's idea of understanding as dialogue and Roland Barthes's emphasis on the reader, arguing that the works do not deliver fixed messages but gain new meanings with each encounter. For a city where independent exhibition spaces are few, the show is a snapshot of Muscat's artist-led scene.