Continuing its 18-year run, Art Dubai returns to captivate cultured art lovers, with 120 galleries exhibiting from over 40 countries
Words: Will Moffitt
Héctor Zamora is a man who likes to put on a show. and performance pieces have made their mark around the globe. In Labor, Zamora had seven women step on unfired clay vessels in Mexico City as a defiant patriarchal rebuke. Lattice Detour, his site- specific sculpture in The Met’s roof garden, formed a delicate curved wall of bricks, casting shadows that played with and responded to the cityscape beyond it. Now Zamora comes to the Middle East for Art Dubai, presenting a new series of performances and site-specific interventions for the fair’s commissions programme that will explore transformation, liberation and the interplay between humanity and materials, with Zamora’s works examining symbolism through clay vessels.
It will be complemented by a site-specific installation by the artist at Alserkal Avenue, marking the start of a new multi-year partnership. Attracting an artist of Zamora’s calibre speaks to Art Dubai’s importance as the most significant global art gathering in the Middle East.
Taking place this year at Madinat Jumeirah from April 18 to 20 – invitation-only previews are on April 16 and 17 – the fair was conceived as a catalyst for the rapid growth of the region’s art scene and creative economy. The event provides a gateway for learning and exchange, championing galleries and artists from less represented geographies. Visitor numbers have seen an incremental rise of 10 per cent year on year from 2007 to 2024. Each year Art Dubai spotlights about 120 contemporary, modern and digital galleries from more than 40 countries, with the gallery programme accompanied by artist commissions and an ambitious education programme.
Commissions include a series of digital artworks responding to Art Dubai Digital’s theme After the Technological Sublime, exploring how human creations may inspire admiration, but also provoke anxiety as these systems could surpass our control and divert attention from other pressing issues. Swiss wealth manager Julius Baer, lead partner of Art Dubai, will present a newly commissioned digital installation by Emirati artist Mohammed Kazem, titled Directions (Merging), which places the coordinates of Dubai at the centre of the space, drawing visitors to converge – a microcosm of the city and the fair.
Retreat, a new work by Italian artist Jacopo Di Cera, reflects on the urgent need for climate action, capturing the melting of the Brenva glacier in the Italian Alps through an impactful four-metre-high piece with more than 30 upcycled screens. Meanwhile, Hybrid Xperience, a collective of Dubai-based artists, engineers and creatives, will present a large-scale kaleidoscope, inviting audiences to visualise their dreams using artificial intelligence.
Taking its title from the Arabic word for electricity, Kahrabaa is a monumental site-specific installation by Ania Soliman that traces complex interconnections between technology, nature and memory. Created in response to Beirut’s energy crisis, Soliman’s five-metre-high canvases blend technological and organic motifs captured in a series of performative acts involving artificial and real plants being thrown on to the canvases. This year’s programme also features interactive installations from two Art Dubai Digital 2025 exhibitors. Following their successful debut in 2024, Ouchhh Studio will return to present MotherEarth, a large-scale AI-driven data sculpture that transforms raw climate data – including air quality, CO2 emissions, humidity levels and temperature changes – into a vivid sensory experience.
New York-based data and kinetic artist Breakfast will present Carbon Wake, a digitally controlled kinetic installation that transforms real-time energy data collected from cities around the world.Gathering energy production data from a new city every minute, the work visualises the impact of the energy choices we make through motion and interaction. The final commission is by Total Arts at the Courtyard, which presents Reconstructed Landscape, an installation that transforms fragments of found objects from the mountains and urban environments of the UAE into an imagined terrain. Through photo collages, sculptures and assemblages, the work will carry traces of each object’s origins, forming a landscape that is both rooted in reality and shaped by imagination.
Modern Masters Established to introduce work by modern Arab artists and explore Arab modernism within a global context, Art Dubai Modern has grown significantly – and this year Latin America features for the first time. While migration has always played a direct role in creating bonds between countries and regions, the two have further converged on common interests and concerns. In their search for modern and national identities to assert their postcolonial realities, heritage and the past become instrumental in negotiating the new.
Artists have used abstraction to contest their exclusion from the western art history canon while navigating their own complex cultural identities, as seen in pieces by Lebanese sculptor Alfred Basbous, who manipulated the human form through line, shape and movement; Lebanese artist Hussein Madi’s abstraction of form into patterns and colours; and Venezuelan artist Darío Pérez-Flores’s delicate manoeuvring of line and colour. Equally, aspects of heritage renewal are manifest in the work of Mozambican artist Bertina Lopes, whose work endowed African sentiments and colours with new meanings, or Sudanese artist Ibrahim El-Salahi, who has engaged the diverse Arab and African symbolism of Sudan’s heritage to create a new iconographic language.
Engaging Exploration This year also marks the fifth edition of the ARM Holding Children’s Programme, the UAE’s largest cultural education initiative, which will, for the first time, feature a collaboration between two artists: Peju Alatise, a widely recognised contemporary African artist who has exhibited at Mayfair’s Rele Gallery, and Alia Hussain Lootah, an Emirati artist, educator and co-founder of Medaf Studio in Dubai. Expanding in schools across all seven emirates, their programme will celebrate local ecosystems, explore ecologies and question our interactions with our surroundings through different artistic lenses. It will also address the cultural significance of water in the UAE’s landscapes, guiding children to examine our connection to this crucial resource and its creative applications in art. Art Dubai is also known for its thought-provoking talks and conferences. The largest arts conference in the Middle East and Africa, the fair’s Global Art Forum will examine how change keeps changing, making everyday life feel more unsettling and unpredictable, akin to science fiction.
Hosted by Global Art Forum commissioner Shumon Basar and curated by Y7, the UK-based post-disciplinary duo Hannah Cobb and Declan Colquitt, the 2025 edition, titled The New New Normal, will explore the cultures and economies that are transforming chaos into progress. Sessions will cover topics including quantum computing, AI, cultural geopolitics and social media.There will also be talks, conferences and workshops on digital art; a platform for collectors to discuss their passions, idiosyncrasies and unique perspectives; a series of conversations that supports the fair’s commitment to scholarship and underexplored art histories; and a series examining the practice, stories and achievements of international and regional artists featured at this year’s fair.
Additionally, a new series of intimate conversations, presented by HUNA, will delve into the lives and practices of leading cultural voices in the UAE. Designed to promote stimulating conversations and vivid exchanges, Art Dubai is a place for art lovers and the culturally curious to discover new artists and ideas. It’s also one big spectacle that promises to be one hell of a show.
