Each edition of Art Dubai forges a relationship between our exhibitors and the selected independent curators, for the four gallery sections: Art Dubai Contemporary, Bawwaba, Art Dubai Modern, and Art Dubai Digital.
Founded in 2007, Art Dubai is the most significant global art gathering in the Middle East. A catalyst for the rapid growth of the region’s art scene and creative economy, it provides an important gateway for discovery, learning and exchange, championing galleries and artists from less-represented geographies.
Art Dubai’s 2025 sections and selected curators intend to foreground the perspective of our geography and the communities we represent.
Our 2025 curated gallery sections are:
Art Dubai Modern focuses on modern masters from South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA), 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, explores the intersection of new media art and technology to expand our understanding of contemporary culture. The fourth edition will be curated by Gonzalo Herrero Delicado, London-based curator currently working for Serpentine galleries and as Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art. Art Dubai Digital 2025 invites visitors to explore how artists and creatives are using digital technologies to address these challenges and shape the future. While technology may help meet future needs, what questions are artists asking of it today? This edition shifts the focus back to art and the critical questions it raises about our present, offering a curated experience that explores how digital culture and media art reflect the challenges society and the planet are facing today, and the role digital technology might play in addressing them.
