Gypsum Gallery is arguably Cairo's strongest contemporary art gallery. I visited the space and saw the current exhibition, dedicated to works on paper.

As the new art season approaches in Dubai, three very different solo shows have some unexpected parallels and point to a regional aesthetic.

Palestinian architects Yousef & Elias Anastas have designed a meditative porous pod for London's Design Festival, after which it will travel to Dubai before returning home to Palestine.

Is it necessary to know Fahrelnissa Zeid’s life story before you can appreciate her art? From her sprawling abstracts to compelling portraits, the current retrospective at Tate Modern charts her life’s work and weaves in her biography too. 

Art Jameel has teamed up with Campus Art Dubai to give informal art education in the UAE a boost. It will include a summer programme and a curatorial partnership

London-based photographic artist Hassan Hajjaj will open a solo show in Somerset House in October as part of 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair. La Caravane will open October 5

This UK debut exhibition for three Saudi artists uses the metaphor of shifting desert sands to talk about rapid urbanisation and modernisation in the Gulf region.

Using freehand strokes of spray paint, eL Seed paints buildings all over the world with poignant messages and in an instantly recognisable style. His latest project is in Ajman, UAE

Frieze Sculpture Park is London's biggest outdoor exhibition and contains some stunning sculptures from some of the world's leading contemporary artists

The curator for next year’s edition of the Abraaj Group Art Prize is Myriam Ben Salah. Born in Tunisia and based in Paris, Ben Salah has been coordinating special projects and public programs at Palais de Tokyo since 2009 with a special focus on performance art, video and publishing initiatives. She is also Editor-in-Chief of the international edition of Kaleidoscope Magazine.

Listening to a description of the materials that feature in Lisa Ross’s photographic series Living Shrines, raises doubts as to where, exactly, the living ­element comes in.

In Between the Lines, an installation by Issay Rodriguez and Katherine Nuñez from Manila was composed of books made from fabric and sheafs of papers carefully crocheted alongside study desk paraphernalia such as paper clips that had also been labouriously stitched.

Geddes does not consider her overwhelmingly cute ­subjects to be props for elaborate costumes. She is an artist and the babies in her photographs are part of a narrative. "The babies are not dressed up like insects or animals, they are playing roles as those characters," she says. "For me, my work is all about storytelling and I am giving them a voice."

Terry Smith, an art critic, outlined this definition by saying that although artists in the 1970s and 1980s did not want to define their work, it would eventually be labelled as conceptual – the goal was to keep the audience guessing, not offer answers to themselves or their viewers – and to keep themselves at a critical distance from the very institutions they were railing against.

Clearly trying to cause public debate, Omari will no doubt be successful in that, because this is not the kind of show that a viewer can pass over without comment but unfortunately, the artwork does not shed light on what it is like for these people, forced to leave their homeland with whatever they can carry and fall victim to traffickers, crooks and a whole corrupt system.

It is testament to the Lebanese artist’s mastery of the medium that, as his viewers take in each work as a whole, its stories reveal themselves easily. In his latest show, the tales are heartbreaking realities of our time.