The latest edition of Art Dubai wrapped up last week. It included usual and new components. The contemporary halls, its main fixtures, featured more than 70 galleries while its newly inaugurated Modern halls included 11 galleries. The latest iteration of the Global Art Forum — its talks platform — was titled Meanwhile ... History. It attempted through its various panels and keynotes on regional and at times obscure history to re-personalise the notion of pre-personal memory, if at times via familiality. It did this by hosting various speakers on subjects as varied as Kuwait’s sincere attempt at modernity from the 1950s-80s, the dissection of the international participants of the Gulf’s pearling industry in the 1800s and, rather unexpectedly, Ibn Khaldun’s The Muqadimmah, the famous 12th Century book, which among other things, chronicled world history. It less successfully tried to connect the Gulf and ‘The Sudan’ and attempt to capture booming Dubai in the 1970s. Its marker exhibition this year was geographically themed around the Caucasus and Central Asia. It was curated by Slavs and Tatars, a collective that investigates the identity of these swaths of localities that has been a collective theatre of Eurasian empire.

Needless to say, there was much to take in and perhaps such complex histories and specific works would have benefited from museum-like textual contextualisations. There was the usual list of various lunches, announcements, inaugurations, book signings and screenings. And finally, there was the inauguration of the modern hall, a showcase of galleries focused on modern art from the region primarily of the 20th Century. Other attempts seemed dull and lacking at first and others may have benefited from further intellectual infrastructure, but it is still very valiant; only effort yields better effort.

The fair has come a long way from its early days when it called itself the Gulf Art Fair, a term that must have made more marketing sense amid a fledging regional art market. And so in many ways, it was a coming of age year; its visitors were many and various, its programme tight-roped the familiar and the new and its talks swayed the abstract and the specific. It was the year Art Dubai lost its sense of exotica. It perhaps swapped the last bit of geographic entitlement for the merit of its programme.

This capacity was made possible by a theme that cascaded across its schedule. Art Dubai attempted this year to propose an idea so obvious it had ceased to be common: The world, and especially this part of it, was always global. Essentially, the fair was an attempt to remind locals and visitors alike that there was work being made here long before it was collectable and worthy of being archived. That artists, thinkers and poets were struggling with their own interpretations of modernity; just as their grandchildren today seem so exotically struggling with postmodernity. The idea is that this place was always there. That it failed and idealised and fragmented and developed, like all other places. That it has a history full of pride and sorrow, like all other places. That it has heroes, villains and idiots, again like everyone else. That it is always gone through booms and busts where fortunes were made and hopes were found and, both, were lost again. It is not exotic but only itself. That it is not a place relevant to other places, but only a place.

It is important to normalise geography. It is part of a long and potentially impossible but equally notable and crucial exercise in imagining a world inhabited by curious humility. Richard Feynman, the Nobel laureate and theoretical physicist, once said: “Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.” The attempts of Art Dubai allowing us to look through our own glasses and others’ more deeply are especially commendable considering it remains a commercial fair with bottom lines of red and black.

Mishaal Al Gergawi is an Emirati current affairs commentator. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/algergawi