Art Dubai’s 2020 Art Commission will be a collaboration with Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai’s recently launched Contemporary Arts Institution. The collaboration will see a months-long season continuum in Dubai, that takes the form of artists’ projects that will be developed, hosted and researched at Jameel Arts Centre, with iterations of the projects to be showcased at Art Dubai in March 2020.

Prabakhar Pachpute’s Artist’s Room, featuring a large scale drawing and sculptural site-specific installation, opens on September 21 at Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai.

The Commissions project is formulated as an invitation to visitors, contributors and organizers of Art Dubai to reflect on their own lives and slow down their ways of existing. It will encourage visitors to recognise one’s influence on their encounters with living matter and with the ecologically concerned themes. It will look at the past and future of cultural heritage through the lens of human productivity and asks the public to think of that heritage through the life and afterlife of non-human organic matter.

Art Dubai 2020’s Commission programme is curated by Paris-based, independent curator Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez.  She has recently curated exhibitions with an ecological focus such as ‘Let’s talk about the Weather. Art and Ecology in a Time of Crisis’ at the Sursock Museum in Beirut in 2016 and the Times Museum, Guangzhou in 2018, both with Nora Razian, Jameel Arts Centre’s Head of Exhibitions. Petrešin-Bachelez has also contributed to various publications and magazines as well as held lectures and organised seminars in which she presents her ongoing research into situated curatorial practices, empathy, transnational feminism, slow institutions, degrowth, and performative practices in the former Eastern Europe.

Speaking on the collaboration, Jameel Arts Centre Director, Antonia Carver stated that: “Jameel Arts Centre is delighted to be collaborating with Art Dubai to co-curate this year’s commissions with Natasa Petrešin-Bachelez, a curator we know well and admire greatly. We welcome local audiences to engage through the year in the artists’ projects as they evolve at the Jameel, and look forward to seeing everyone, local and international, at the fair next March.”