Each year, Art Dubai works closely with leading cultural professionals and academics both locally and internationally to create a tightly curated presentation that has become known as the pre-eminent art fair for the region. For our 20th edition, under the curatorial framing ‘Future, Past, Present’, we are pleased to build on existing formats and establish new platforms, as well as work with new collaborators and old friends of the fair. Welcoming more than 100 modern, contemporary and digital presentations from over 35 countries, Art Dubai’s 2026 edition (17 – 19 April, with previews on 15 and 16 April) features a multidisciplinary and multicultural line-up that reflects the momentum and character of Dubai: dynamic, diverse and future-focused.

Art Dubai Galleries: Taymour Grahne Projects – Samira Abbassy, Tree Spirits (2025), collage, acrylic and gouache on art board, 15 x 20

BAWWABA 2026

Bawwaba | بوابة (meaning gateway in Arabic) serves as a portal of discovery, with dedicated solo presentations of newly produced work, offering a platform for emerging to mid-career artists. In 2026, the section will be curated by Amal Khalaf, a curator and artist who is the Co-Artistic Director of the 2026 Busan Biennale in South Korea. Formerly the Civic Curator at the Serpentine Galleries (2009–23) and Director of Programmes at Cubitt, London (2019–25), her recent curatorial projects include Ghost 2568 (2025) in Bangkok, Thailand, and Sharjah Biennial 16 (2025) in the UAE. Khalaf co-curated Art Dubai’s flagship transdisciplinary summit Global Art Forum in 2016, as well as co-founded the art collective GCC while attending the fair—GCC went on to curate 2018’s edition of The Room, an immersive and interactive installation that ran from 20-24 March 2018.

For its seventh edition, and to mark Art Dubai’s 20th anniversary year, Bawwaba will foreground practices that unfold in the in-between—between disciplines, identities and geographies—reflecting Dubai’s own character as a site of convergence. With galleries from Brazil, France, Jordan, Poland, Romania, Senegal, and the GCC, the section rethinks definitions of region, identity, and influence, and reframes the idea of ‘emerging’ not in relation to a centre, but rather as generating new centres.

Highlights include a new site-specific installation by Adrian Pepe (SOLO Gallery, Romania) created in collaboration with the Dubai-based architect-designer Omar Al Gurg (Modu Method, UAE) that brings together materiality, architecture, and performance; and Iyad Qanazea Gallery’s (UAE) presentation of Mohammed Al Hawajri, who was recently displaced from Gaza and relocated to Sharjah, bringing more than 300 of his rescued works with him.

Further details of Art Dubai’s 20th anniversary programme will be announced in January 2026. A full list of confirmed Art Dubai participants can be found here

ART DUBAI DIGITAL 2026

Art Dubai Digital is the leading platform for digital art in an art fair context, bringing together visionary artists, galleries, studios, and collectives reshaping the digital landscape. In 2026, the section is curated by Ulrich Schrauth, a curator and creative director in the field of immersive media and digital art, serving as the Artistic Director of the UBS Digital Art Museum in Hamburg; and Nadine Khalil, an independent art critic and curator based in Dubai who collaborates with contemporary artists exploring performance, environment, and technology. A long-time collaborator with Art Dubai, Khalil has participated in several editions of Global Art Forum.

Celebrating its fifth year and building on its foundational work in the field, Art Dubai Digital 2026 is titled ‘Myth of the Digital’ and questions the long-held separation between ‘digital art’ and contemporary art history. Building on the Czech-born Brazilian media theorist and writer Vilém Flusser’s notion of the ‘technical image’, the section will explore how we see through the technologies that have reshaped perception and propose that the practices of digital and contemporary art are profoundly entangled, extending from modern and postmodern image-making.

Art Dubai Digital 2026 will foreground installation-led and multisensory practice, from AI-driven data sculptures and interactive screen-based installations, to digital stained glass and textile-informed surfaces. The section will feature globally recognised artists including Six N Five (Plan X, Italy), Marina Abramović (Nature Morte, India & TAEX, UK), Rachel Rossin (Albion Jeune, UK), Morehshin Allahyari (Gazelli Art House, UK and Azerbaijan), and Daniel Iregui (Iregular, Canada), alongside emerging voices including Ecem Dilan Köse (Art On Istanbul, Turkey), Sulaiman Al Salem (Iris Projects, UAE), Sara Niroobakhsh (Next Chapter by IRIS Contemporary Space, Iran), Fatma Lootah (Rarares, UAE), and Solienne (Automata, USA).

ZAMANIYYAT 2026

Zamaniyyat | زمانيات  (from zaman, the Arabic word for ‘time’), is a reconfigured section featuring solo and group presentations that revisit the work of artists who shaped and reshaped modernisms throughout the 20th century in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The section is curated by Dr. Sarah A. Rifky, a curator, writer, and art historian who has held curatorial, founding, and leadership roles internationally, including at Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, documenta 13 in Kassel, and the art initiative Beirut, which she co-founded in Cairo (2012–15).

Zamaniyyat will bring together 11 galleries to consider art practices from the 1950s to the 1990s. It will trace modernism’s movement through art schools, publications, and institutions showing how it unfolded across uneven global histories rather than a single shared timeline. Abstraction, attention to material, and image systems—grid, weave, imprint, stencil, offset—anchor Zamaniyyat’s selection across painting, works on paper, textiles, reliefs, and sculpture. 

The section will include more than 45 artists working across some 20 countries, tracking how methods travelled with students, teachers, and artworks moving between cities and, at times, into exile. Highlights include Gallery One (Palestine), exploring a Cairo-schooled Palestinian lineage; AA Gallery (Morocco), presenting two generations shaped by the Casablanca Art School; Dhoomimal Gallery (India), with a retrospective of Bimal DasGupta, one of India’s early abstractionists; Agial Art Gallery (Lebanon), mapping the 1960s-70s development of abstraction across Beirut, Damascus and Baghdad; Zamalek Art Gallery (Egypt), offering a five-decade arc of Gazbia Sirry (1925-2021); Richard Saltoun Gallery (UK), exploring exilic modernism across North Africa and the Levant; and Galerie Mueller (Switzerland), offering a transnational survey of postwar abstraction from Switzerland, Germany, the U.S, and Japan.

BAWWABA EXTENDED 2026

Art Dubai 2026 also sees the launch of Bawwaba Extended, a new artist-focused platform dedicated to interdisciplinary artistic practices. Spanning the entire fair environment, Bawwaba Extended—curated in collaboration with Amal Khalaf and Alexie Glass-Kantor, Executive Director, Curatorial, Art Dubai Group—will transform the site into a dynamic space for experimentation and innovation through installations, digital media, moving image, sound, and public interventions.