Art Dubai 2025: A World of Contexts and Crossroads
With over 120 exhibitors from more than 65 cities, Art Dubai 2025 continues to assert its role as a platform for discovery, dialogue, and exchange. This edition welcomes over 30 first-time participants and brings together a dynamic mix across the Contemporary, Modern, Bawwaba, and Digital sections. From the Middle East to South Asia, Africa to the Gulf, the fair’s geographic scope highlights its enduring commitment to artists from less-represented regions, while reflecting Dubai’s rise as both a cultural and commercial hub.
Curated by Mirjam Varadinis (Bawwaba), Magalí Arriola and Nada Shabout (Modern), and Gonzalo Herrero Delicado (Digital), the fair continues to place regional narratives in meaningful dialogue with global art histories. It’s a space where new voices meet established names, and where ideas move across borders, disciplines, and generations.
Curated By: A Collector’s Gaze on Art Dubai Contemporary
Among the 72 galleries in this year’s Contemporary section, Selections invited a handful to slow the pace and reflect on a single artwork from their presentation — one piece that captures a curatorial thread, a conceptual tension, or simply a moment of resonance.
This feature is less about booth overviews and more about intent: what makes one work stand out, and why? Through the eyes of the galleries themselves, we glimpse the stories, materials, and meanings shaping this year’s edition — one artwork at a time.
Albarrán Bourdais – Kaminrot, “brique à bancher – acrotère”
Sabrina Amrani – Chant Avedissian, Bukhara floral pattern
Soaked in an amalgam of influences, Avedissian began creating multi-faceted work decades ago that was local yet global, simple yet complex. His work combines decorative and architectural elements with a rich variety of icons and figures from Ancient Egypt, as well as from many other civilisations and cultures that have existed along the Silk Route. From the mid-70s, Avedissian has been constructing a visual archive that reinterprets patterns and images from art and artisanal work made over 3,500 years ago, from the Levant eastward. The process of decomposition of the image and its subsequent reconstruction, the reuse of what is existent that Chant applies in his works in wood, textile or gouache on corrugated cardboard, constitute a formal and conceptual metaphor for the construction and mutation of civilizations along of the centuries, giving rise to a paradoxical work in which Avedissian speaks to us at the same time of what distinguishes us and of what resembles us.
ATHR – Rami Farook, “Light Clouds Over a Dark Sky”
Light Clouds Over A Dark Sky, 2021 -2015
Mixed media on canvas
Experimenter Gallery – Bani Abidi, “Society for aching bodies“
On 26 October 2023, Abidi hosted an impromptu gathering with old friends and new acquaintances, inviting them to bring with them “a text, a poem, a conversation… that can hold our hand through this time of grief and exhaustion.” Her first artistic response to this seismic moment was to look at these gatherings and conversations as kinds of secret testimonials. Over eight months, as the drawings evolved with the escalating dangers and subjugation of anti-genocide voices, so did the desire to hide the faces of all the people who gathered.
Ayyam Gallery – Ali Kaaf, “Rift M8”
representations that dissociate art from its decorative connotation. Kaaf refers to the
works as ‹non-faces›, perceiving them not as human forms but as representations of
God’s creation—his thumbprint within the world. They transcend the human form,
embodying something deeper. Blackened sections, holes, burns, and cuts adorn his
works, further distancing them from traditional beauty, as if emerging from darkness
and ash. Rift M 8 delves into an evolving yet repetitive theme of presence and
absence, which he describes as essential «both visually and in relation to emptiness.
The repetition of form leads me to something new.» The recurring forms in Kaaf’s work
suggest a cycle of loss and healing, reflecting the ongoing struggle between confusion
and clarity. Influenced by Sufism, his consistent patterns possess a spiritual quality—an
interplay of liminality, where the familiar and the unknown coexist.
Galerie Krinzinger – Alfred Tarazi, “Lovers (Music)”
Alfred Tarazi has been working relentlessly for the past then years on a massive project called The Lovers. At the beginning, it was a narrative piece based on the lives of Georgina Rizk and Ali Hasan Salameh. Then, with much research, the project turned into a 5-hour video piece relating the story of the Palestinian Revolution and the Sexual Liberation in Beirut in the 1970s. The piece we are exhibiting is about the agency of music and popular culture in both these revolutions.
O Gallery – Armin Ebrahimi, “Night Adventure”
While Armin’s practice often draws on allegory and symbolism, this piece (from a larger
collection) marks a subtle shift—rooted not just in memory or history, but in the filtered perception of reality as mediated through screens. Emerging from narrative fragments and Armin’s nightly strolls through his neighbourhood is a drawing that feels both cinematic and intimate, as though composed of overlapping narratives. The composition appears split: on the left, two figures rendered in dark and expressive lines feel immediate and grounded; contrasted by a lighter, more ambiguous space on the right, less a setting than a backdrop, hinting at artifice, staging, or the quiet eeriness of absence. This tension between presence and illusion, between something lived and something seen, gives the piece a depth that resonates with our current moment. It’s this layered, searching quality that made it stand out to me among the many compelling works we’re showing this year.
SANATORIUM – Irmak Canevi, “Should I Start Knitting?”
Irmak Canevi’s process originates in an ongoing activity: the rigorous redecoration of his studio. Content in the passage is suspended and entrapped to make still-lives, which then become souvenirs from a singular time and place. His works in SANATORIUM’s Art Dubai 2025 booth showcase worlds that are places of conflict, transformation, and refuge for experimentation and play. Canevi’s sculptures, which have a systematic syntax, are playful puzzles that combine tools, models, and units. In a creative process that lies somewhere between experimentation and play, the artist groups and transforms the materials he collects every day, establishing a safe place for components that cannot stand on their own. Works alternate in becoming each other’s internal and external skeletons, grow increasingly hybrid as they accumulate mass, and allow for exchanges between their own textures.
Rooster Gallery – Egle Karpaviciute, “Keep it to yourself”
Egle Karpaviciute, Keep it to yourself. Based on ‘Comedian’ by Maurizio Cattelan, oil on canvas, 60×50, 2025. Courtesy to the artist and The Rooster Gallery.
A witty response to Maurizio Cattelan’s ‘Comedian’, this work preserves the banana-and-duct-tape concept through oil painting, offering permanence to a famously impermanent gesture. In transforming a viral contemporary artwork into a classical medium, Karpaviciute both critiques and elevates the role of painting in preserving cultural moments. This painting proposes an ironic longevity for one of the most discussed artworks of recent years.
Project 88 – Risham Syed, “The Olive Tree Series”
Despite the fragility (and volatility) of memory itself, banal objects often become containers of oneiric and political realities as one rediscovers their intrinsic, imminent, and deeply felt narratives. Soft textiles morph into temporal and geopolitical landscapes in Risham Syed’s Texts and Contexts: The Olive Tree Series. Syed transforms vintage Chinese jacquard silk panels, which she inherited from her late mother, into woven layers imbued with the weight of history. Out here, unexpected juxtapositions hold your gaze: gentle florals and ancestral sari borders lie embedded inside fierce, conflicted political cartographies. Syed invites viewers to confront the entangled threads of our existence, where past and present, and local and global intersect. This convergence reveals the fissures in our shared humanity and the resilience that bridges everyone.