Art Dubai Contemporary showcased galleries from around the world, ranging from emerging art scenes to established centers, and offered new global perspectives to help cultivate a culture of discovery.

Applications were reviewed by the Art Dubai Selection Committee Andrée Sfeir-Semler, Founder, Sfeir-Semler Gallery (Beirut/Hamburg) and Priyanka Raja, Co-Founder, Experimenter, (Kolkata/Mumbai), as well as our 2025 section curators.

Find the full list of exhibitors for Art Dubai Contemporary 2025 by clicking on the button below.

Bawwaba, meaning ‘gateway’ in Arabic, was curated by Mirjam Varadinis, a writer and Kunsthaus Zürich Curator-at-large with an extensive curatorial career, with many of her projects addressing evolving formats of contemporary curating.

This section presented 10 solo presentations featuring artworks created within the past year or conceived for the fair. For its sixth edition, Mirjam asks the question ‘How can we imagine new forms of coexistence, both amongst people and with our planet?’. With this, the section showed artists who reflected on their own displacement in our current climate, and imagine new models of living together.

Bawwaba serves as a portal to the discovery of works created in the past year or specifically for the fair itself, offering visitors a curated reading of current artistic developments across wide geographical scopes.

Find the full list of exhibitors and the section overview for Bawwaba at Art Dubai 2025 by clicking on the buttons below.

Art Dubai Modern 2025 was curated by Magalí Arriola, art critic, and Director at Museo Tamayo, Mexico, and Nada Shabout, Art History Professor at the Contemporary Arab and Muslim Cultural Studies Initiative at the University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, U.S.

Art Dubai Modern featured presentations by the region’s Modern masters, reinforcing Art Dubai’s commitment to art historical research and under-explored art histories. These artists have been influential throughout the 20th century, and their works play a key role in forming an understanding of the current cultural landscape.

During the twentieth century, migration, Arab diaspora communities, geopolitical challenges and anti-imperial struggles led to strong cultural affinities and solidarities between West Asia and North Africa and other postcolonial regions around the world. Beyond direct relationships, these different countries shared commonalities that resulted from navigating their new realities. In their search for modern and national identities, heritage and the past became instrumental in negotiating the new, and experiments in abstraction and heritage renewal speak of shared concerns and aspirations.

Find the full list of exhibitors and the section overview for Art Dubai Modern 2025 by clicking on the buttons below.