Art Dubai returns to Madinat Jumeirah this week for its 20th event, bringing galleries, collectors, artists and cultural institutions back together after a challenging period.
The special edition runs from Friday to Sunday, following a preview day on Thursday. Entry is free, and this year’s fair is more concentrated than the previous events, with gallery booths, institutional exhibitions, public art, poetry readings, DJ sets, performances and multimedia installations gathered across the main conference area.
John Martin is back at Art Dubai this year as a gallerist, almost 20 years after helping launch the event as its co-founder and original director. The fair he returns to is now surrounded by the institutions, collectors and galleries that were only beginning to take shape when it started.
“From the outset, we wanted to provide a platform for something people could get excited about,” Martin tells The National. “There was already a community across the region – not only in Dubai – of artists, galleries and people who wanted to be involved. They saw Art Dubai as an opportunity to make it their own.
“And what it’s grown into is very exciting,” he says. “It’s now a very vibrant art scene, very diverse and very open to new ideas. It feels more exciting here than pretty well anywhere else.”
The UAE art scene’s evolution is visible across the fair. Rather than spreading through Madinat Jumeirah and the adjacent Mina A’Salam hotel, this year’s scaled-back event is centred in the main conference area. Visitors move through the gallery presentations before reaching dedicated spaces for Alserkal Avenue, DXB Store, Dubai Collection and Barjeel Art Foundation. Public artworks appear around the site, while performances and music continue through the programme.
The smaller footprint has given the fair a more immediate atmosphere. Preview day has been busy, joyful and communal, with collectors and art enthusiasts moving between booths, talks and institutional presentations.
“It’s an incredibly well-loved fair,” Martin says. “People have a loyalty to this that I’ve rarely seen in other fairs. The other ones are business things, and this is much more like a family.”
One of the most visually striking presentations comes from Emirati artist Rami Farook, whose booth is built using sand gathered from UAE beaches. The material covers the walls and floor, surrounding a group of works made over the past nine months. Some were created before the Iran War, while others came after.
The works include self-portraits, social portraits and landscapes, with Farook looking at Dubai, the Gulf and the relationship between artists and the city around them.
“This Art Dubai is unbelievable,” Farook says. “It’s half galleries and commercial, and the other half is all institutional and programming. You feel like you’re coming into a biennial.”
Gallery One from Ramallah has also drawn attention with works by Palestinian artist Amjad Ghannam that reinterpret paintings by Pablo Picasso. The booth has become one of the fair’s busy early stops, bringing one of modern art’s most familiar visual languages into a Palestinian context.
“My relationship to Picasso did not begin in a museum, but in a prison cell,” says Ghannam. “As a former political prisoner, I participated in the 2011 Picasso in Palestine project. I return to Picasso not to imitate him, but to reclaim the radical potential of his visual language.
“By filtering it through narratives from Palestine, the Arab region and the Global South more broadly, I ask why Western pain is granted universal meaning, while ours remains conditional. Picasso’s political works remind us that art can protest, accuse, and demand accountability. My work continues that conversation, but from the other side of the curtain.”
The institutional presentations give the anniversary edition much of its weight. Dubai Collection has a dedicated room for Made Forward, an exhibition curated by Jumanah Abbas and drawn from more than 20 private collections in the UAE. The show includes works from the collections of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Vice President and Ruler of Dubai, and Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed, chairperson of Dubai Culture and Arts Authority.
The exhibition brings together artists from West Asia, North Africa and South Asia, with works by Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim, Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq, Leila Nseir and Brahim Dhahak among the highlights.
Barjeel Art Foundation is presenting Pulse: Masterpieces from the Barjeel Art Foundation, a 20-work exhibition curated by Rimi Homsa for the fair’s 20th event. The show includes artists such as Mahmoud Said, Samia Halaby, Mohamed Melehi, Safeya Binzagr, Kamala Ibrahim Ishag and Etel Adnan, tracing social, cultural and political change across the region through modern Arab art.
Barjeel founder Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi points to the histories carried by the works themselves.
“These works have survived the First and Second World Wars,” Al Qassemi says. “They survived civil wars. Some works with the collection have survived one civil war and then a second civil war, and then Palestine, Lebanon and then back. These works have really seen our harsh times, and yet here they are.”
Digital and multimedia work is also closer to the centre of the fair this year. Foundry Downtown Dubai is presenting an installation that physically recreates imagery generated through artificial intelligence, bringing questions around technology, authorship and manual production into the main visitor route.
Giuseppe Moscatello, co-founder and artistic director of Foundry, says the revised layout helps remove the separation often placed around digital work.
“Digital and new technologies are considered to be just a medium,” he says. “What you represent, what you want to express, is more important.”
Younger UAE galleries are also part of the anniversary story. Iris Projects is presenting work by Emirati artists Alyazia Al Nahyan and Safeya Sharif, with practices that engage landscape, natural materials and shifting environments.
Maryam Al Falasi, founder of Iris Projects, says the booth was shaped around the fair’s anniversary theme and the question of what comes next for artists working in Dubai.
“For the 20th event, we wanted to focus on the future, because Dubai loves the future,” she says. “We wanted to showcase the future of these artists in Dubai.”
The wider programme extends beyond the booths. Art Dubai’s official programme includes talks, Dubai Collection tours, the DXB Store, the Unwritten Poetry programme and a Listening Bar with vinyl sessions, live acts and DJs.
The result is a fair that asks visitors to move through more than a market. The galleries remain central, but the 20th edition also gives space to the collectors, foundations, artists, performers and public programmes that now sit around Art Dubai.
Martin says the changes in the city are striking when seen from the perspective of someone who helped launch the fair and now returns from abroad each year.
“It’s very young, very vibrant. It’s very well supported,” says Martin. “It’s truly like nowhere else.”
Art Dubai runs at Madinat Jumeirah until Sunday