Now entering its 18th edition, Art Dubai returns next week to the Madinat Jumeirah hotel with over 120 galleries and a slate of new commissions, digital installations, and discussions aimed at defining the cultural and technological stakes of contemporary art. The fair, which opens with a VIP preview on April 16, continues to position itself less as a marketplace and more as an incubator for regional ideas with global resonance.
That global resonance has been spurred by a number of prominent biennials in the region like the Sharjah Biennial, which opened its 16th edition in February, and the second Islamic Arts Biennale in Saudi Arabia, which opened in January. Saudi Arabia also boasts the AlUla Arts Festival (now in its fourth iteration) and Art Week Riyadh, which launched its inaugural edition earlier this year.
For New York–based Bortolami Gallery, that institutional development helped push it to participate in Art Dubai for the first time. “[It] was definitely a factor in deciding to participate in the fair,” senior director Evan Reiser told ARTnews, describing the gallery’s participation as an “exploratory mission” to survey the region’s appetite for contemporary art and meet local curators and artists.
“We have to try to understand the market ahead of time and understand what people are looking for, meeting the obligation to our artists to introduce their work to new audiences,” he added.
The gallery’s booth will feature works by Daniel Buren, Robert Bordo, and Leda Catunda, among others.
Since 2007, Art Dubai has carved out a dual identity as both a commercial hub and a cultural institution, rooted in partnerships with business, government, and academia. This year’s edition underscores that ambition with commissions from regional and international artists, new institutional alliances, and expanded programming across education and digital platforms.
In the years since the fair started, Dubai’s gallery scene has developed considerably, according to Sunny Rahbar, the founder of the city’s Third Line gallery, which opened in 2005.
“The art scene is booming,” Rahbar told ARTnews. “So many galleries have opened in the last three or four years.”
The Dubai art market’s growth, according to Rahbar, has been supercharged since Covid, when the Emirate was one of the first major tourist destinations to re-open to visitors. After a spike in early 2021, Dubai clinched the number one spot on Bloomberg’s Covid Resilience ranking thanks to having the world’s highest vaccination rate and a massive push for affordable testing.
“There was a real influx of, not only Westerners, but Arab expats as well, Lebanese, Egyptians, Iranians,” Rahbar said, adding that while the Dubai of 20 years ago, when the gallery first opened, was a more transient place, today’s artists and dealers are proud to be Arabs, and they aren’t looking to the West anymore for validation. “They’re like, ‘This is where I’m from and this is where I want to be, here in the Arab world,’” he said.
To that effect, Third Line will bring a mix of artists from the Middle East and the diaspora, including Amir H. Fallah, Hayv Kahraman, and Kamran Samimi, to Art Dubai.
The fair’s role sits comfortably within the UAE’s broader economic ambitions. For over a decade, the UAE has worked to diversify its economy from oil, driving significant investment into turning the Emirates into a tourist destination and economic hub for the Middle East. Culture is a significant part of that strategy and has led to the development of the sprawling multi-billion dollar Saadiyat Island development, which includes the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the forthcoming Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. The country’s non-oil economy has grown significantly over that time and now accounts for nearly 75 percent of the country’s GDP. Non-oil GDP grew by 4.6 percent last year and is forecast to grow by another 5 percent this year.
Art Dubai then, while modest in size compared to, say, Art Basel, is a critical barometer for the Emirates’ larger economic goals, according to Mohammed Hafiz, cofounder of ATHR gallery in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
“The art market in Dubai, like the economy, is growing—it’s maturing,” Hafiz told ARTnews. “Saudi Arabia is the same. You can’t compare the UAE or Saudi Arabia to New York, of course, but, like anywhere in the art world, you travel to meet people and build relationships, and these relationships grow with time.”
Many galleries, according to Hafiz, come to Art Dubai in the hopes of building relationships with the many museums in the region, like longstanding-ones overseen by Qatar Museums, or those currently in development, like the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. Many such institutions are still building their collections and looking to acquire art from different eras, or commission new works.
“It’s really a greenfield market in Dubai, and there is opportunity for galleries who can think strategically and are willing to make an investment,” he said.
According to Ben Floyd, CEO of Art Dubai Group, the fair’s parent company, the market in the Emirates continues to grow even amid “global uncertainty.”
That development is mirrored by the growth in high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs). A report last year issued by New World Wealth and Henley & Partners estimated that the number of HNWIs in the UAE will grow by 39 percent from 2021 to next year, or from 160,000 to over 228,000. Another report by the same authors, issued this year, found that the number of millionaires in Dubai has doubled over the last decade and is set to double again by 2035.
“This is already impacting favorably on the luxury market in the region and will only stand to benefit Art Dubai and the galleries here in Dubai, which is very much the center of the Gulf and regional art market,” Floyd said.
Earlier this year, the fair made two major hires, nabbing Dunja Gottweis, Art Basel’s global head of gallery relations, to take over as fair director, and Alexie Glass-Kantor, previously the executive director of Artspace in Sydney, for the newly created position of executive director, curatorial.
The appointments, according to Floyd, have led to an increase in interest from local and international collectors, as well as new galleries and partners looking to engage in the Middle East.
Dubai, like Hong Kong before it, has positioned itself as an access point for the region for global capital and talent. It has established free trade, security, and British-style legal policies to that end, as the Economist laid out in 2018. Art Dubai, on a smaller scale, seems to be hoping that it can become, like Art Basel Hong Kong, a meeting place for the region’s art market and a draw for the international art world.
