Meaning ‘gateway’ in Arabic, Bawwaba is a portal for discovery dedicated to solo presentations of newly produced works by emerging to mid-career artists that reflect the cultural, political, and aesthetic concerns shaping their local contexts.
Curated by Amal Khalaf, Director of Programmes at Cubitt, co-curator of the Sharjah Biennial 16, and curator of Ghost 2568 in Bangkok.
Bawwaba returns as the fair’s portal, a gateway not only into the experience of the fair itself, but into a renewed way of thinking about what emerging means, what regional signifies, and what new models of gallery practice may look like in a transforming art ecosystem. In Art Dubai’s milestone year, Bawwaba foregrounds practices that unfold in the in-between; between disciplines, identities and geographies, reflecting Dubai’s own character as a site of convergence.
Bawwaba 2026 proposes an alternate logic rooted in friendship, long-term relationships, and collective ways of working. Rather than treating artistic emergence as a category, it presents it as a process of care, conversation, and accompaniment. Here, emergence is understood in an ecological sense: the way complex forms and futures arise from the interactions of many smaller elements, producing outcomes greater than the sum of their parts.
The section galleries reveal shared concerns around belonging, movement, resilience, and the production of knowledge. The galleries invited, both returning and newly introduced, have built ecosystems that sustain experimentation even when conditions are uncertain. This relational approach underscores Bawwaba’s belief in artistic experimentation that grows out of interconnectedness, not isolation.
