Hightlights at Art Dubai 2025
Art Dubai 2025: A Celebration of Identity, and Innovation
Cynthia Guttierez
Art Dubai has long stood as a cultural bridge between East and West, a stage where global narratives unfold through a distinctly regional lens. This year’s edition, marked by a careful curation of emerging and established voices, reaffirmed the fair’s position as a vital meeting point for artistic dialogue across continents. With 30 first-time galleries joining the roster, Art Dubai 2025 struck a resonant balance, where experimental mediums met historic legacies, and the personal seamlessly converged with the political.
From powerful showcases of Palestinian resilience to conceptual installations reimagining the language of cities, this year’s fair was less about spectacle and more about substance. Artists didn’t just exhibit, they invited us into conversations around land, memory, displacement, gender, and the complexities of identity in a rapidly shifting world.
Here are 10 standout highlights from Art Dubai 2025.each a testament to the power of contemporary art to shape, question, and transform our shared reality.
1. A Spotlight on Palestinian Artists
Art Dubai 2025 brought Palestinian voices to the forefront. Mirna Bamieh’s fermentation-based installations—bridging grief, memory, and land—were a standout, while Saj Issa’s poetic ceramics at Tabari Artspace explored heritage, longing, and historical reclamation. Her showcase, Never Make a Wish in a Dry Well, is created from a lived experience. After a visit to her family home in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, Saj brought back shards of 10th-century pottery she found near a former ceramics factory.“She didn’t just preserve them – she pulled them into her process, fusing them into glazes or sealing them in glass,” says Maliha Tabari.
2. Faiza Butt’s Provocative Exploration of Masculinity
Presented by Grosvenor Gallery, Faiza Butt’s ink-jet and hand-drawn works provided a deeply layered look at masculinity in contemporary Pakistan, beautifully merging intimate portraiture with bold socio-political commentary.
3. Mirna Bamieh’s ‘Sour Jars’ at NIKA Project Space
Blending culinary arts with visual storytelling, Bamieh’s “Sour Jars” were a poetic metaphor for resilience and cultural memory. Her use of brined paper and site-specific engagement captivated audiences.
4. Greta Schödl’s Timeless Visual Poetry
Richard Saltoun Gallery brought renewed attention to the Italian artist Greta Schödl. Her ink and gold leaf compositions, using repeated letters and symbols, transformed language into meditative abstraction, a powerful feminist statement decades ahead of its time.
5. Rana Begum at The Third Line
Always a fair favorite, Rana Begum returned with vibrant minimalism and geometry. Her 2022 piece No.1132, shown by The Third Line (led by longtime regional champion Sunny Rahbar), reaffirmed her place as a master of form and color.
6. Abdullah Al Othman’s Monumental Installation
Saudi artist Abdullah Al Othman’s LED installation with Iris Projects, Manifesto: The Language And The City II, interrogated the hybrid identity of cities and citizens. Fusing traditional motifs with contemporary tech, the scale and precision were unforgettable.
7. Maria Abaddon’s Felted Worlds at Verduyn Gallery
Peruvian artist Maria Abaddon stunned with her tactile, organic works. Her piece, Fusion of Smooth Cells and Snow Melt, created with wet and needle felt, evoked the raw beauty of biological life and environmental transitions.
8. Shezad Dawood’s Neon Symbolism
Jhaveri Contemporary presented Shezad Dawood’s Disposable Mementoes (Stingray), combining neon, canvas, and cultural critique in a surreal narrative of consumerism, memory, and migration.
9. Adonis—The Poet as Artist
Hilton Contemporary offered a rare treat: mixed-media works by legendary Syrian poet Adonis. Layered with calligraphy, pigment, and emotional resonance, these pieces bridged literary legacy with visual experimentation, affirming that poetry can be both seen and felt. The visual we’ve used for our cover photo is “Untitled, 44”.
10.TAEX Booth 22: Algorithmic Perception – Tatsuru Arai
Tatsuru Arai, a Japanese composer, sound-graphic programmer, and multimedia artist whose work redefines the frontier between music and the metaphysical. Arai’s creative practice is rooted in the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk—a total work of art—where classical composition, cutting-edge technology, and visual structure intersect.
