The art and culture events you won’t want to miss across Europe next year
Travelling to Europe in 2026? Here’s what’s on in France, Spain, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands for Muslim culture lovers
If one of your new year’s resolutions is to consume more art and culture, then look no further.
Hyphen has scoured Europe’s cultural calendar for 2026 and picked out the best in film, music, exhibitions and performances from diaspora communities around the continent.
With roots across the Arab world, north Africa and Asia, the events we’ve chosen span six countries — and include the biggest ever European celebration of the Kurdish and Persian new year.
Festival of African, Asian and Latin American Cinema (Fescaaal), Milan, 20-29 March 2026
Originally launched in 1991 as the African Film Festival, Fescaaal has evolved over the years into a showcase for the cinema, cultures and realities of three continents. This year’s programme is still in development, but recent jury prize winners have included Muma, a film following a second-generation British-Somali teenager as she deals with grief and belonging; Khartoum, which follows five characters in the Sudanese capital; and Passing Dreams, about a 12-year-old Palestinian boy searching for his beloved carrier pigeon.
Trésors de Banlieues, Paris, 15 February to 13 April 2026
Paris’s banlieues (suburbs) are home to millions of working-class and migrant residents, many with backgrounds in former French colonies in north Africa. The number of residents under 18 with at least one parent born abroad is as high as 57% in the 1.5 million-strong neighbourhood of Seine-Saint-Denis.
These areas are often stereotyped as dangerous and lawless, with right-wing media referring to them as “no-go zones” in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack in 2015. But events such as Trésors de Banlieues are fighting back against this narrative by showing off the creativity of the neighbourhoods’ residents.
The second iteration of this festival takes place in a repurposed factory called Usine Chanteraines. As well as huge murals by renowned street artists, more than 250 objects are on display including paintings, sculptures, ceramics, photography and even furniture. Items are organised around 11 themes, including childhood in the banlieues, housing and family memories.
Adira Drag Festival, Berlin, dates TBD
Founded in 2023, Adira is a Berlin-based queer Arab pop party that blends nostalgic fun with art and creativity, aiming to challenge orientalist ideas about Arab identity. For the last two years it has also hosted the world’s first Arab drag festival, gathering more than 30 performers from all over south-west Asia and north Africa. As well as performances, this multi-day event features workshops, panel discussions and DJ sets. Last year’s event took place at the Festsaal Kreuzberg, nestled on the banks of a canal in the heart of Berlin’s historic Turkish quarter.
Nawa festival, Vienna, summer 2026
As well as being an abbreviation for “north Africa and west Asia”, the word Nawa also means song, melody or sound in both Arabic and Persian. This four-year-old festival brings together both traditional and contemporary art and music from across the region, celebrating its rich diversity of influences, cultures and languages. It’s held in the iconic jazz club Porgy & Bess, located on the site of a historic cabaret theatre, and last year’s festival even included an orchestra brought together specially for the event.
Ongoing exhibitions at the newly opened Fenix museum of migration, Rotterdam
Since opening its doors earlier in 2025, this Netherlands arts centre is on its way to becoming a major cultural hub. The museum’s directors aim to show how migration is “timeless and universal” and tell the full, nuanced stories of global diasporas.
Current exhibitions include Suitcase Labyrinth, an installation of thousands of suitcases — some dating back to arrivals in Europe from central and east Asia via the trans-Siberian railway in the 19th century — paired with audio narrations telling the stories of their former owners.
There’s also The Family of Migrants, a photography show featuring images taken from the early 20th century onwards, from crowds of Europeans travelling by boat to the “new world” in the 1900s and arriving in the UK from the Caribbean in the 1950s, to families escaping the Syrian civil war in the past decade. There are also rotating lunch pop-ups from a variety of Netherlands-based chefs.
Newroz festival, Cologne
Germany is home to the biggest Kurdish diaspora in Europe, with more than a million of its residents claiming heritage in the Kurdish regions of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. Last year the community staged what is thought to be the biggest Newroz festival — the Kurdish and Persian new year, which marks the start of spring — ever to take place in Europe. Around 40,000 people gathered in the western German city of Cologne to wave flags, sing, dance and listen to speeches. Diaspora organisations from across the continent announced in November 2025 that they plan to make 2026’s event on 20 March even bigger, and are hoping to stage it in a football stadium with space for up to 65,000 people. Akif Hassan, supervisor of the Newroz celebration preparatory committee, told Kurdistan 24 the event would “showcase Kurdish culture and folklore”.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom, Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona, 13 February to 26 June 2026
Nestled in the buzzing Raval district, Barcelona’s premier contemporary art gallery hosts a huge (and regularly changing) permanent collection as well as a roster of world-leading exhibitions. This year, Palestinian artistic duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme will debut a multi-disciplinary audiovisual installation developed specially for the space, exploring themes of oppression and dispossession alongside the experiences of incarcerated people, including members of the Black Panthers in the 1960s and Palestinians currently held in Israeli jails. The artists have spent years researching songs and poems written by prisoners around the world, and use sound, text, image and performance to explore collective memory.
Arabesque Festival, Montpellier, France, September 2026
Every year since 2006, this festival has celebrated the culture and creativity of the various north African and west Asian diasporas that call southern France home. Over the course of more than a week, a variety of venues in this charming small city feature music performances, theatre, film screenings, storytelling, food pop-ups and even calligraphy showcases. As this is southern France in early September, you can expect the weather to be warm enough for plenty of the shows and gatherings to take place outdoors, too.
