20 years of Art Dubai: How the fair became the foundation of Dubai's cultural identity

Dubai: When Art Dubai launched in 2007, there were around 10 commercial galleries in Dubai. Today, there are more than 40. That number alone tells part of the story, but only part of it.

This year, as the fair returns for its 20th edition from May 15 to 17, the conversation has shifted. It is no longer about what Art Dubai is, but about what it has built, and what two decades of deliberate, sustained investment in culture leaves behind.

From annual event to year-round institution

"The most defining shift is that Art Dubai grew from being an annual fair into part of the city's year-round cultural infrastructure," says Benedetta Ghione, Executive Director of Art Dubai Group.

"That has been a series of conscious decisions made over time, to invest in commissioning, education, research and public programming alongside the commercial fair, and to keep extending that work outward into the city."

Some of the most significant careers in contemporary art today have a chapter that begins at Art Dubai.

Wael Shawky won the Abraaj Group Art Prize at the fair in 2012. Ruangrupa, the Indonesian collective that would later curate Documenta 15, was introduced through the Marker section in 2011. Yto Barrada showed at Art Dubai Commissions in 2012 and is representing France at this year's Venice Biennale. The GCC artist collective, whose members include Fatima Al Qadiri, Monira Al Qadiri and Amal Khalaf, came together in the fair's VIP room in 2013.

"Two decades of moving the needle is a sustained build of careers, programmes and patronage that have solidified Dubai's place in the global art world," Ghione says.

A community gathering, not just a fair

The 20th edition arrives at a complex moment for the region, but Dunja Gottweis, Director of Art Dubai Fair, is clear that the response has been to lean into community rather than retreat from it.

"This special edition is, above all, a testament to what 20 years of building can do," she says. "The heartbeat of this edition is the continued belief that coming together still matters, especially now."

Around 60 per cent of the gallery programme comes from the region, a figure that surprises some first-time visitors but captures precisely what the fair has always stood for.

Long-standing exhibitors sit alongside first-time participants, and the result is a programme that feels grounded without being fixed.

Among the most powerful threads running through this year's edition is the presence of Palestinian artists, including Nabil Anani, Mohammed Al Hawajri and Dima Srouji, whose work addresses land, identity and memory with urgency and depth.

The digital presentations have also evolved. Where earlier editions were dominated by screen-based work, this year artists are using technology to create physical, sensory experiences.

Daniel Iregui presents interactive works driven by real-time tracking and directional sound, while Siddhartha Kunti translates the scent of oud into a digital-physical artwork through molecular science and 3D modelling.

What to see and who to watch

For first-time visitors, Gottweis points to a programme that rewards curiosity and time. Emirati artist Hashel Al Lamki, presented by Tabari Artspace, brings an installation created in collaboration with artisans across Mallorca, Kerala and Cairo.

Roudhah Al Mazrouei, presented by Taymour Grahne Projects, brings new works spanning painting, film, sculpture and printmaking. "That is where Art Dubai is most itself," Gottweis says, "in the meeting point between the established and the emerging, the local and the international, the artwork and the conversation around it."

Reshaping the experience of the fair

That sense of the fair as a gathering rather than just a marketplace runs through the work of Alexie Glass-Kantor, Executive Director Curatorial at Art Dubai Group, whose programming this year has actively reshaped how visitors move through and experience the fair.

The collaboration with Alserkal Avenue produced Moving, a co-curated moving image programme bringing together 13 artists working across experimental film, animation, documentary and poetics, presented both at Alserkal Avenue and within the fair's Cinema Majlis.

"What interested us was the possibility that audiences could encounter the works differently in each setting," Glass-Kantor explains, "perhaps pausing briefly while moving through the city, or sitting for an extended period within the fair itself."

The installations across the fair grounds extend this further. Ahmed and Rashid bin Shabib's Manameh pavilion draws on Gulf architectural traditions to create a contemporary meeting space at the fair's centre, while Khalid Al Banna's large-scale geometric sculptures transform how visitors navigate the site entirely.

Hashel Al Lamki's Maat, suspended above the gallery halls and transforming reclaimed textiles and natural pigments into an environment shaped by light and material memory, is among the most visually arresting works in the programme.

Building what comes next

The curatorial framework for this edition, "things we do together", emerged, Glass-Kantor says, not from the anniversary itself but from what the anniversary clarified.

"I don't think the anniversary has made us nostalgic. If anything, it has sharpened the sense of responsibility around what Art Dubai can continue to become."

Ghione echoes that forward momentum. "Success looks like a maturing gallery ecosystem, a rapidly expanding collector base, and a year-round cultural environment the fair anchors," she says.

"Art Dubai will continue to build the conditions that allow culture to thrive, because that is what cities that endure are made of."

Twenty years in, that project is very much still underway.