At the centre of our not-for-profit programme is Art Dubai Commissions, a commissioning platform that invites artists to produce site-specific works, further enhancing the cultural landscape and supporting artistic production by local and international artists. The Art Dubai 2020 Commissions will introduce multi-disciplinary site-specific projects with an ecological focus, curated by Paris-based, independent curator Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez. For the first time, the Commissions will be undertaken in collaboration with the Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai’s leading contemporary art 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.

The Commissions are inspired by the artists who have been at the forefront of critically reflecting the actual moment of an increasing societal racialisation and the profound ecological crisis. Spread across the different areas of the art fair, the Commissions will be formulated as an invitation for the visitors to imagine how to care for one another and for the environment that we inhabit, to get to know the grounds on which we move, to understand the human and more-than-human processes on which we depend in order to survive. An aspiration that is common to all of the commissions is to heighten awareness to the environment of the region through the use of locally sourced materials, through the downsized amount of transport used for the production, through no usage of plastic and prioritising materials that are free of toxic chemicals and are recyclable.