Art Dubai Opens Its 2025 Edition With Its Own Pace

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.

Art Dubai opened to VIPs on Wednesday with all the familiar trappings of a global art fair—VIPs in sunglasses, polished presentations, branded lanyards, and an ocean of champagne. Though the fair opened at 2 p.m.—later than the usual 11 a.m. or noon—the exhibition hall didn’t truly fill until just before 5 p.m. Still, there was strong foot traffic, a handful of early sales, and more than a few notable names mixed in among the VIPs.

Spotted in the aisles were Indian businesswoman and arts patron Usha Mittal, Christie’s CEO Bonnie Brennan, Christie’s exec Alex Rotter, and London dealer and collector Ivor Braka. There were also ARTnews Top 200 collectors Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi (founder of the Barjeel Art Foundation) and Elie Kouri, who was rumored to have made several purchases in the opening hours. 

Beneath Art Dubai’s flash lies a confident maturity. It isn’t Art Basel, nor is it trying to be. This year’s fair had around 120 exhibitors from over 60 cities, with a clear emphasis on regions not often featured extensively in European or American events of its kind. There are, of course, many artists and galleries from the Middle East and the Gulf, but the fair also featured numerous galleries from countries like India, Iran, Morocco, China, and Singapore, to name a few.

“In the last 20 years, what was perceived to be the periphery has become the center—and that means the city of Dubai itself, and the fair along with it,” Antonia Carver, director of Dubai’s well-regarded Jameel Arts Centre, told ARTnews.

For the few blue-chip galleries that made the trip to Dubai, they too made the periphery the center. Almine Rech’s presentation spanned an intergenerational and international group of artists that included French Syrian artist Farah Attasi, Lebanese artist Ali Cherri, Iranian artist Mehdi Ghadyanloo, Vietnamese artist Tia-Thuy Nguyen, Nepali artist Tsherin Sherpa, and Los Angeles-based artist Umar Rashid, who just curated a Robert Colescott show at Blum’s LA location. Meanwhile, influential Berlin gallery Peres Projects anchored its presentation with a speculative painting of the UAE’s underground cable networks by Chinese artist An Moon.

“We came back because we’re building relationships in the region,” founder Javier Peres told ARTnews, noting Dubai’s growing appeal to collectors seeking “order, progress, pace … It’s not what they expected, but that’s the point.”

For local galleries, Art Dubai was an opportunity to take the spotlight. Carbon 12, one of the first galleries to open in Dubai’s all-important Alserkal Avenue, reported a strong opening, with founder Kourosh Nouri noting that the first VIP day went well enough to warrant a full rehang for day two. 

Also reporting sales in the early going was Priyanka Raja of Experimenter Gallery (Kolkata, India), who said she had sold 80 percent of her booth. A.R.M., an Emirati holding company and a leader partner in the fair, told ARTnews that it had made $275,000 in acquisitions, including works by London-based Bangladeshi artist Rana Begum (at Dubai’s Third Line gallery) and French artist Christine Safa (at Bortolami).

The Dubai- and New York–based Leila Heller Gallery, meanwhile, presented a sweeping program spanning both contemporary and modern artists from across the Middle East and its diaspora. The thematic throughline—“Resonance of Body, Soul, Faith, and Loyalty in the Romance of Leila and Majnun”—tied historical narrative to contemporary figuration and abstraction. Heller told ARTnews that at both Art Dubai and in the city, the gallery receives far more recognition and attention than it does in the US.

“As a woman—and for my women artists—we feel more empowered in this region than we ever do in America,” Heller said. “My artists are superstars. The appreciation we get here—it’s real.”

Dubai’s Efie Gallery, which is dedicated to promoting contemporary African art, brought a standout showing that included a luminous watercolor triptych by María Magdalena Campos-Pons, fresh off her ARTnews Lifetime Achievement Award. With works by Hugh Findletar, Abdoulaye Konaté, and J. K. Bruce Vanderpuije, the booth delivered depth and dialogue without straining for spectacle. Konaté’s layered textile piece drew elegant parallels between West African and Middle Eastern visual traditions, while Findletar’s “Flowerheadz” series fused the ritual of mask-making with the material delicacy of Murano glass.

The most ambitious section of the fair may well be Art Dubai Digital, now in its fourth edition. Curated by Gonzalo Herrero Delicado, it featured nearly 30 presentations using AI, VR, and mixed reality to interrogate everything from ecological collapse to algorithmic divination.

One of the standouts in the section was Fãl Project, a phygital installation by Iranian artist Mohsen Hazrati and presented by Dubai’s Inloco Gallery. The work merges handcrafted sculpture, Persian poetics, and artificial intelligence to explore bibliomancy—the ancient practice of divination through texts—in a digital context. The installation comprises 15 ceramic bird sculptures embedded with NFC technology. When scanned, each sculpture triggers a custom algorithm that delivers a personalized divination, generated in real time from open-source digital material. Hazrati drew inspiration from Fal-e Hafez, the centuries-old Iranian tradition of seeking spiritual guidance from the poems of 14th-century mystic Hafez. The result is an experience that feels more like a whispered memory than a machine prediction.

Another notable digital presentation came from London-based Ace Art Advisory, who presented works by BREAKFAST, an artist who creates sculptures that transform real-time data into dynamic physical forms, bridging the physical and digital through a language of motion. One work, Carbon Wake (2025), visualizes cities’ energy usage in real time, dramatizing the shift between fossil fuels and renewables with rippling motion. Another, Portraits in Pink, Blue, and Silver (2022), captured short video clips of each viewer and cycled through them using the artist’s custom-engineered flip-disc medium, creating a collective archive of engagement and reflection.

The commissions too pushed boundaries. Highlights included Mexican artist Hector Zamora’s sculptural interventions, part of a new partnership with Alserkal Avenue, and a digital commission by Emirati artist Mohammed Kazem. Both underlined Dubai’s ongoing efforts to align its cultural programming with its broader tech-forward brand. 

By 9 p.m. on the first VIP day, the aisles were still buzzing. Unlike New York or London, where the art crowd is usually halfway through dinner by then, in Dubai, the deals were just getting started.  As Pablo del Val, the fair’s artistic director, told ARTnews, “This is not a market for trophies. It’s not about fighting to win the waiting list.”