This week, the global art crowd descends upon Madinat Jumeirah for Art Dubai 2025 (Instagram), the Middle East’s most dynamic—and deliciously unpredictable—art fair. With over 500 artists and 120 galleries from 65 cities, this year’s edition promises to be an intoxicating blend of boundary-pushing contemporary work, regionally grounded retrospectives, and experimental digital fantasies. Think: a little less white cube, a little more new world order.
This isn’t just an art fair—it’s a cultural multiverse. Four meticulously curated sections—Contemporary, Modern, Digital, and Bawwaba—offer everything from West Asian modernist legends to digital dreamscapes crafted by algorithm and augmented reality. Artistic Director Pablo del Val has once again gathered an ambitious cast of galleries and curators to make Art Dubai a crucial node in the global art network, and this year’s fair feels less like a regional satellite and more like a gravitational force in its own right.
In Bawwaba, curated by Kunsthalle Zürich’s Mirjam Varadinis, the focus is on works made within the past year that grapple with ideas of migration, displacement, and radical togetherness. Ten solo presentations from ten countries underscore the section’s mission: to look forward by rooting deep. Meanwhile, Art Dubai Modern expands its horizons to include Latin America for the first time, in a nuanced conversation between geographies of shared complexity and resilience. Curated by Dr. Nada Shabout and Magalí Arriola, the section is an elegant rebuttal to Western-centric art histories.
And then there’s Art Dubai Digital—a world unto itself, curated by Gonzalo Herrero Delicado, where the future is sculpted with code. Expect an AI dream kaleidoscope by Dubai-based Hybrid Xperience, a kinetic data-reactive sculpture by BREAKFAST, and a glacially inspired tech-epic by Jacopo Di Cera. It’s the only section of its kind at a major international fair—and it knows it.
Off the gallery grid, a flurry of commissions, performances and installations keep the pulse of the fair racing. Alymamah Rashed’s poetic, celestial commission for Piaget fuses gold leaf and deep blues to reimagine time itself. Andy Warhol’s iconic BMW M1 Art Car makes its Dubai debut, celebrating 50 years of the brand’s pioneering art-meets-speed programme. And Mohammed Kazem’s Julius Baer commission, “Directions (Merging),” uses GPS to map the poetics of Dubai’s place on the global cultural map.
The programming is just as ambitious as the artwork. The Global Art Forum, Digital Summit, and daily conversations with curators and collectors put Art Dubai at the centre of crucial discourse. Notable speakers include Hans Ulrich Obrist, Rem Koolhaas and Lawrence Abu Hamdan. And if all that leaves your head spinning, the After Dark series—with DJs like Habibi Funk and Melika—will keep the mood gloriously grounded in groove.
Art Dubai is where old civilisations meet new media, and where art becomes a portal into tomorrow. As the fair opens its gilded gates once again, one thing’s clear: the future isn’t coming—it’s already here, shimmering beneath the desert sun.
For more stories of art and culture, visit our dedicated archives.
