Art Dubai will return to the UAE in March 2021. Photo Solutions
Art Dubai will return to the UAE in March 2021. Photo Solutions
Art Dubai will return to the UAE in March 2021. Photo Solutions
Art Dubai will return to the UAE in March 2021. Photo Solutions

Art Dubai 2021: Fair to turn city into a 'performance ground' with programme of art interventions


Melissa Gronlund
  • English
  • Arabic

Art Dubai has announced new programmes for its long-standing fair, the anchor of Dubai's spring art season. When the event opens in March, it will be one of the first art fairs to be held in person since the coronavirus pandemic began.

Organisers are hoping that Dubai's lower case rate – owing to the country's restrictions on movement and having already passed through the hot summer months of largely indoor activity – will mean international gallerists, collectors and art professionals will feel comfortable coming to the UAE in the spring.

So far, the thinking has paid off: 86 galleries have signed up. And additional programming will make the fair experience as much about commerce and networking as about entertainment and exposure to new artists.

VIPs in the preview days of the fair will be taken to 35 performances, street activations and installations spread out across the city, by artists linked to Art Dubai participating galleries, including Filipino artist Kristoffer Ardena and Lebanese artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan.

"The city will become a performance ground," says Pablo del Val, Art Dubai's artistic director. "It will allow collectors to discover new parts of Dubai through the eyes of artists."

While galleries will be installed at Madinat Jumeirah as in previous years, the fair is also collaborating with sites across the emirates, such as Dubai's Jameel Arts Centre. Warehouse421, the art space in Abu Dhabi, will host an exhibition of Emirati artists on the grounds of Art Dubai. The show will demonstrate what del Val calls the depth of young artists in the UAE, as a new generation emerges from the country's recent investment in art education.

"The country's art scene has become a place of production as well as display," he says.

The programmes also cap a period of change for the event. When Art Dubai started in 2007, it was one of the few international events, pre-dating art spaces such as Jameel Arts Centre and Warehouse421. Its director position (held for a long time by Antonia Carver, who del Val started alongside in 2015) has now effectively grown into a team of three: del Val,  Chloe Vaitsou as international director and the new hire of Hala Khayat as regional director.

Pablo del Val is Art Dubai's artistic director. Art Dubai
Pablo del Val is Art Dubai's artistic director. Art Dubai

Amid these internal changes, a suite of new strands were introduced. These include a Modern section, which will be folded into the main space of the fair and curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, in addition to the Bawwaba section, selected by Bombay curator Nancy Adajania, which will look to art scenes in the Global South.

The coming fair, however, won't include Residents, which hosted international artists on short-term stays in the UAE, or Gulf Now, which featured artists and collectives from the Arabian Gulf.

The city will become a performance ground ... It will allow the collectors to discover new parts of Dubai through the eyes of artists

However, one thing seems particularly telling: as the UAE art landscape has grown more crowded, so, too, has the international fair calendar, and like all fairs, Art Dubai has had to find its USP. Now, with an increasing weighting towards non-western galleries and artists, it seems to have fully embraced its geographical position within Global South exchange.

The choice of Khayat, previously the long-time Christie's Middle East specialist, is likewise aimed at bringing in Middle Eastern collectors, many of whom tend to be bigger buyers at auction than at fairs.

The lower price point offered at many Art Dubai galleries – which has always given the fair its endearingly raucous, upstart feel – will also fit the budget of newer or regional collectors. This will be key for next year's event : major collectors from the US and Europe will still be unlikely to come in large numbers.

Lawrie Shabibi's booth at Art Dubai in 2019. Photo Solutions
Lawrie Shabibi's booth at Art Dubai in 2019. Photo Solutions

Some galleries that had left the fair, such as Sabrina Amrani from Madrid, will be returning, and new entrants include +2 from Tehran, Mono Gallery from Riyadh, Stems Gallery from Brussels and, in the Modern section, Dirimart from Istanbul, Comptoir des Mines from Marrakesh and Gallery Misr from Cairo.

Returning participants include Art Addis Fine Art from Addis Ababa and London, Gallery 1957 from Accra, Experimenter from Kolkata, Silverlens from Makati City in the Philippines, as well as Athr and Hafez from Jeddah, Sfeir-Semler from Beirut and Hamburg, and Dubai galleries such as Ayyam, Isabelle van den Eynde, Lawrie Shabibi, Meem, The Third Line and Zawyeh.

Bawwaba will focus on what Adajania calls "off-site" global art centres, with galleries coming from New Delhi and Karachi, and Cuban and Yemeni-Bosnian-American artists – a combination that would be hard to find elsewhere.

Art Dubai will be open to the public from Wednesday to Saturday, March 17 to 20, at Madinat Jumeirah

Conflict, drought, famine

Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.

Band Aid

Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.

Dhadak 2

Director: Shazia Iqbal

Starring: Siddhant Chaturvedi, Triptii Dimri 

Rating: 1/5

Red flags
  • Promises of high, fixed or 'guaranteed' returns.
  • Unregulated structured products or complex investments often used to bypass traditional safeguards.
  • Lack of clear information, vague language, no access to audited financials.
  • Overseas companies targeting investors in other jurisdictions - this can make legal recovery difficult.
  • Hard-selling tactics - creating urgency, offering 'exclusive' deals.

Courtesy: Carol Glynn, founder of Conscious Finance Coaching

Long read

Mageed Yahia, director of WFP in UAE: Coronavirus knows no borders, and neither should the response