The Days Go On: 20 Years of Ayyam Gallery

The Days Go On: 20 Years of Ayyam Gallery is a group exhibition at Ayyam Gallery on Alserkal Avenue in Dubai, from 16 November 2026 to 1 January 2027. It marks the gallery's twentieth year. The show sets out to gather works by every artist who has shaped Ayyam since 2006, and the gallery names 52 of them. An archive of the gallery's history is shown with the works.

The gallery's director, Maya Samawi, has organised the show with two co-curators, the painter Safwan Dahoul and the artist Ali Kaaf. Both also have work in it. The gallery presents each curator as one unbroken line through its history, in which earlier and later work answer each other. The archive follows that history as fully as the gallery can, through its artists, the people and places around it and the events that shaped it.

Khaled and Jouhayna Samawi founded Ayyam in Damascus in 2006 with five established artists. They believed Syrian art could grow if it was given support. A competition, Shabab Ayyam, later brought younger artists into the programme. A Dubai space followed through Khaled's partnership with his cousin Hisham, and then Beirut, Cairo, London and Jeddah. Some of these branches did not survive the Arab Spring. The gallery also ran Ayyam Publishing, Ayyam Editions, an auction for young collectors and a residency for young artists. Its roster widened from Syria to the wider region. In 2016 it cut back to concentrate on the gallery itself, and the founders' children have run it since 2018.

The list of artists includes Youssef Abdelke, Samia Halaby, Tammam Azzam, Khaled Takreti, Mouneer Al Shaarani, Oussama Diab, Abdulnasser Gharem, Sama Alshaibi, Rula Halawani and Khaled Jarrar. Dahoul was born in Hama, Syria, in 1961 and has worked on his Dream series since the late 1980s. The image shown here is his painting Dream 286 (2025), acrylic on canvas. The gallery has not yet published the works selected for the exhibition.