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Curatorial Ethos
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XVA Gallery is a contemporary art gallery in the Al Fahidi Historical Neighbourhood, founded in 2003 by Mona Hauser in the former home of the Seddiqi family — a restored wind-tower house with three courtyards, three wind towers and a rooftop terrace. One of the leading galleries in the Middle East for contemporary art from the Arab world and Iran, XVA presents a rigorous exhibition programme of emerging, mid-career and established artists, with works now held in major international collections including the Metropolitan Museum and the British Museum. The space also operates as a boutique art hotel with fifteen individually designed rooms and an award-winning vegetarian café.
Why this gallery matters
Exhibo editorial
XVA started as a boutique hotel in a wind-tower house that used to belong to the Seddiqi family — Dubai's Rolex dealers — and became one of the most important contemporary art galleries in the Middle East almost by accident, and then very much on purpose. Mona Hauser, the founder, arrived in Al Fahidi in 2003 and saw what the architecture suggested: three courtyards, three wind towers, a rooftop terrace, labyrinthine alleyways that slow time down. She built a hotel and a gallery and a vegetarian café and a shop into the same building and let them exist together without explaining why they should. The gallery programme focuses on contemporary art from the Arab world and Iran — emerging, mid-career and established artists responding to their environments in ways that are, in Hauser's description, somehow connected to Dubai or to something that resonated with her. Artists shown at XVA are now in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum and the British Museum. The gallery directed the Bastakiya Art Fair for several years and has participated in Art Basel Hong Kong. When they started in 2003 they were sending handmade invitations by post. The mint lemonade in the courtyard café is, by consistent account, impossible to put down.
Visit
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Address
Al Fahidi Neighborhood, Bur Dubai
Opening hours
- Monday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Tuesday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Wednesday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Thursday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Friday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Saturday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Sunday
- 10:00 – 18:00
Contact
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Full directory →Artists
Represented and guest artists exhibiting with the gallery.
Jane Beveridge
Jane Bailey Beveridge was born in Edinburgh in 1976 and grew up in Hong Kong. She studied Graphic Design and Fine Art at the University of Brighton, graduated in 1998, and arrived in Dubai in 2002. She joined the art department at Dubai College that same year and has been Head of Art there since 2007. That is twenty-four years of teaching other people to look at things. It has also been twenty-four years of looking herself — at swimming pools and their ordered mosaics, at construction sites, at the dusty haberdasheries on corners that have been there since she arrived, packed from floor to ceiling with thread, fabric, tools and brightly coloured domestic objects. These are among her most cherished places in Dubai. Not the malls. Not the towers. The places that have been overlooked in a city best known for its extravagance. Her practice builds from what she collects: corrugated cardboard, concrete, sand, rust, tangled wires, weathered wood. Mixed-media assemblages that combine painting with mosaic, textiles and found objects. She calls them "five-letter-word adverts" — a reference to her years-long collection of five-letter words whose meaning she finds emotionally precise: TRUST, TRUTH, VOICE, GRACE, ALIVE, TOUCH. DUBAI is five letters. So is LOCAL. The repetitive act of gluing, stitching and knotting is deliberate — meditative, she says, a quiet form of devotion. LOCAL at XVA Gallery in 2026 was her first solo show.
Charlie Koolhaas
Charlie Koolhaas studied sociology in New York and media art at Goldsmiths College in London. She has lived and worked in London, Dubai, Guangzhou, Lagos, Houston and Rotterdam. In each city she stayed long enough to understand what it was actually made of — not the skyline but the tiles, the facades, the corner shops, the surfaces that accumulate time and don't get photographed because they're not spectacular enough. She has been documenting Dubai since 2005. Her book City Lust (2020) brought together twenty years of photographic and written work across five cities — London, Guangzhou, Lagos, Dubai, Houston — exploring the apotheosis of globalisation and the creativity that persists inside it. Domus called her images "clues in a human landscape and a multiculturalism that is more complex and deep-rooted than what the western eye is willing to concede." The photographs became sculptures. The sculptures became garments. Through her Foto-Couture series, she translates images of urban architecture into clothing and printed textiles — making the archive mobile, turning buildings soft, giving memory something to wear. Her work has been shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Vitra Design Museum, Alserkal Avenue and institutions across Europe and Asia. She is based in Rotterdam. She keeps returning to Dubai.
Partners
Institutional partners, collaborators, and allied organisations.
