Art Dubai is the Middle East’s leading international art fair, taking place every March in Dubai, UAE. Since 2007, Art Dubai has cemented its role in being a major catalyst in the local, regional, and international conversations on art from the Middle East and surrounding regions (MENASA – Middle East, North Africa & South Asia), broadening conversations about art from the Global South beyond traditional Western-led geographical scopes and narratives.
Art Dubai 2025 will feature 4 sections:
Art Dubai Contemporary welcomes applications from commercial art galleries from around the world. Final selections are based on the curatorial strength of the gallery's proposal and programme, and applications are reviewed by the Art Dubai Selection Committee as well as our 2025 section Curators.
Art Dubai Modern presents modern masters from the Middle East, Central and South Asia and Africa, featuring presentations by artists who have been influential throughout the 20th century, and whose works play a key role in forming an understanding of the current cultural landscape. For the first time, Art Dubai Modern will include Latin America in this section, as it addresses migration around the mid nineteenth century that influenced a growing relationship between Latin America and SWANA. The selected curators are Magalí Arriola art critic, and Director at Museo Tamayo, Mexico, whose independent pursuits have seen her work on international projects, such as the Mexican Pavilion for the 58th Biennial, and Nada Shabout, Art History Professor at the Contemporary Arab and Muslim Cultural Studies Initiative at the University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, U.S, whose research and teaching works to confront, address, and respond to the art historical neglect of modern and contemporary art from the Arab world.
Bawwaba | بوابة (meaning gateway in Arabic) serves as a portal to the discovery of works created in the past year or specifically for the fair itself, offering visitors a curated reading of current artistic developments across wide geographical scopes. The selected curator is Mirjam Varadinis, a writer and Kunsthaus Zürich Curator-at-large with an extensive curatorial career, with many of her projects addressing evolving formats of contemporary curating. For its sixth edition, Mirjam asks the question 'How can we imagine new forms of coexistence, both amongst people and with our planet?'. With this, the section will show artists who reflect on their own displacement in our current climate, and imagine new models of living together.
Art Dubai Digital, the premier section dedicated to digital in an art fair, located in Mina A’Salam, invites Gonzalo Herrero Delicado, curator at Serpentine Galleries, and lecturer on digital culture at the Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins, to curate its fourth edition. This year, Art Dubai Digital will explore the contrasting ways in which technology can shape our near future, and the wide-ranging responses that artists can provide to the challenges that the planet and society are facing today.