Art Dubai 2025 has opened at Madinat Jumeirah and has reestablished its status as one of the Middle East’s premier art fairs and a world platform for cultural innovation. This year’s edition with over 120 galleries from 65 cities across five continents offers audacious programming to redefine the art-tech-educational-cross-cultural dialogue.
Towards a Global Stage for Creative Exchange
According to the Artistic Director Pablo del Val, “the fair of discoveries,” Art Dubai 2025 provides a fluid space for emerging and established voices. The fair operates through the four following sections:
- Art Dubai Contemporary: A section to present a wide array of galleries from around the world, giving new global perspectives and nurturing a culture of discovery.
- Bawwaba: Bawwaba in Arabic means ‘gateway,’ offering an avenue to discovering artwork created in the last year or specifically for this fair, thus providing visitors with a curated reading of the current artistic developments across wide geographical scopes.
- Art Dubai Modern: Organized by Magalí Arriola and Nada Shabout, this section showcases presentations by the region’s Modern masters, reinforcing Art Dubai’s commitments to art-historical research and neglected art histories.
- Art Dubai Digital: Curated by Gonzalo Herrero Delicado, this section speaks of the intersection between new media art and technology, thereby broadening our comprehension of contemporary culture.
Collectively, these sections speak to the tales of migration and exchange that are conditioning the making of the ever-future world.
Empowering the Next Generation
Youth engagement is at the core of Art Dubai’s mission. The 2025 edition will see the fifth-year running of the A.R.M. Holding Children’s Programme, the largest cultural education program in the UAE. This year has seen the first collaboration between two artists: Peju Alatise, a contemporary African artist who represented Nigeria in the 2017 Venice Biennale, and Alia Hussain Lootah, an Emirati artist, educator, and co-founder of Medaf Studio in Dubai. The programme celebrates local ecosystems, exploring different ecologies through varied artistic lenses.
The student-curated exhibition ‘Common Grounds’ in partnership with Zayed University showcases a range of works from 1949 to 2024. This initiative bears out Art Dubai’s commitment to academic-cultural collaboration and the nurturing of future curators.
Art Meets Technology: The Digital Frontier
Art Dubai Digital 2025 investigates the changing nature of the relationships between art and technology. Curated by Gonzalo Herrero Delicado, the section After the Technological Sublime focuses on these very experiences of awe and wonder when faced with monumental technological innovations. By extending traditional definitions of the sublime to encompass human-made creations, it contemplates how technological advancement elicits both admiration and anxiety.
The section introduces pioneering artists working to reformulate digital creativity, including Refik Anadol, an artist known for AI and data-driven art.
Dubai: A Cultural Powerhouse
Art Dubai 2025 highlights the accelerating cultural power of the UAE. It was launched by Her Highness Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Chairperson of the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority, who emphasized that it provides a platform for celebrating creativity that reflects the diversity of culture defining the city. She also put emphasis on ensuring platforms such as Art Dubai keep the record of arts and innovation in the Dubai of the future.
The growth of the fair complements Dubai’s strategic initiatives that are designed to build an active cultural ecosystem where artists, collectors, and galleries from anywhere in the world feel they can come.
Art Dubai 2025 is a bold vision for cultural innovation that combines traditional genres of art with the most futuristic forms of technology for the global conversation. The fair shall ultimately be the site through which Dubai clinches its leadership of the world in creativity and cultural exchange.
To read more, visit the official Art Dubai website.