When Art Dubai first launched in 2007, it was recognised as “the leading international fair for the Middle East and South Asia”. Over the past 17 years, however, it has expanded in scale and scope, evolving into the most prominent art fair for a much larger region. It showcases artists and galleries from a wider remit than first anticipated, mirroring the rapid growth and development of its home city, Dubai, a meeting point for the so-called “Global South”—a complex term, the meaning of which I will address further in this essay.
A fundamental tenet of the fair has always been to contribute to the development of the country’s cultural economy. When the fair began in 2007, the art scene in Dubai—and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as a whole—was in its infancy. Much of this stemmed from a wide range of curated programming at the fair, primarily led by not-for-profit organisations, that has brought together thought leaders, creatives and organisations to produce events, talks and artworks at the fair.
Over the years, Art Dubai has become increasingly curated—not only carefully selecting the best galleries of the region, but also using the expertise of specialist external curators to address issues within the field or shed light on lesser known artists, practices and geographies. This is essential work for the region of the Global South that the fair covers, which is collectively understudied and has, until recently, been sidelined in art history.
In quantitative terms, the success of Art Dubai is self-evident: the 2023 edition of the fair saw 34,000 local and international visitors and had a direct economic impact of 142.9 million AED (US$38.9 million) for the city of Dubai. Unravelling the ways in which the curated programming has contributed to the art scene in Dubai, and the Global South at large, is much more complex. For example, Art Dubai has always been considered a “fair for discoveries”—the place to see artists who will go on to feature in major exhibitions and biennials—before they become internationally famous, alongside many who have already reached acclaim. This essay aims to explain how Art Dubai came to be focussed on the Global South; how its curated sections and programming aim to contribute to the creative economy of the region; and how notions of the Global South are changing—and the scope of Art Dubai along with it.
Just as the size and scope of Art Dubai has changed since 2007, so has the focus and programming. Art Dubai was born during the rise of the “mega-galleries”. While it is hard to pinpoint the exact moment, possibly in the early 2000s, that this term was coined, a cursory search online highlights an article in The Art Newspaper from 2004 titled: “The globalisation of the art market, the rise of mega galleries and proliferation of art fairs is putting strain on young artists, even while they reap the rewards”.[1] (Incidentally, it was written by Marc Spiegler, who worked as an art journalist before going on to run the world’s biggest art fair brand and home to mega-galleries, Art Basel, for 15 years.) In 2013, the New York-based art critic Jerry Saltz described “the four behemoths”—Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner and Pace—as the “bull elephants of the field, galleries that galumph everywhere all the time, Hoovering up artists and money and monopolising attention. With their enormous spaces, multiple branches, well-oiled business models, massive staffs, PR networks, market power and endless capitalization, they are overwhelmingly present.”[2] At the same time, major art fair brands Art Basel and Frieze were expanding to other cities—from Miami and New York to Hong Kong—and taking their staple mega-galleries with them. For this reason, there was a large emphasis in the early years on bringing in Western mega-galleries to Art Dubai. It was an unspoken rule—and still is for many—that for an art fair to be successful, it had to have these blue-chip galleries participating year on year.
In 2011, Art Dubai introduced the Marker section, which was a not-for-profit initiative that brought together a curated programme of galleries and art spaces focussed on a particular geography outside of the fair’s Middle East and South Asia remit. During its tenure (until 2016) it featured Indonesia, West Africa and Latin America, among others. The boundless creativity of Marker’s so-called “periphery” geographies soon spilled out into the main fair and slowly became a part of Art Dubai’s orbit. Simultaneously, Western blue-chip galleries became less of a focus.
In 2016, Art Dubai’s team decided to formalise this repositioning, creating a description of the fair that better reflected its participating galleries and the DNA of Dubai. Today in the Emirate, 88% of the more than 10 million population are expats. Art Dubai wanted to serve, and reflect, this community and make them its focus. Selecting a succinct description that captured the uniquely global nature of the city was difficult and was heavily debated within the Art Dubai team. We settled on the term Global South, which we believed to encapsulate the kinds of South-South and East-East co-operations, cross-cultural and economic exchanges that proliferate in Dubai. This year, 65% of the galleries at Art Dubai are from the Global South.
As Dr Christianna Bonin, assistant professor of art history at the American University of Sharjah and the curator of Art Dubai Modern in 2024, says, the term Global South “allows us to identify commonalities between diverse communities” and “has become a way to refer to developing communities who have a shared experience of subjugation during the colonial era, and more recently, under global capitalism. Linking practitioners from those contexts can strengthen self-definition and efforts to tackle current injustices.”
Art Dubai clearly had not been the only organisation in the region grappling with a reorientation of the art world. Within months of the fair choosing to reformulate its position, other cultural groups and initiatives announced their plans under the remit of “Global South”, too. Today, almost a decade later, the term is widely used within the field. The Venice Biennale, considered the pinnacle of the Western art calendar, will be organised by the Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa and he describes his proposition as focussing on artists “who are themselves foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, émigrés, exiled and refugees – especially those who have moved between the Global South and the Global North”.
That being said, the team at Art Dubai have always been aware of its complexity as a concept. The geographies it covers are not well defined and there are negative connotations attributed to the term Global South, given that it is often conflated with the stigmatising expressions “Third World” or “Under Developed Countries”. Dr Bonin argues that, like any concept, the Global South “always needs to be nuanced with discussion of the specifics of ethnicities, religions, political allegiances, languages, and so on”. Just as the term Global South has morphed over the decades it has been in use, it continues to do so today. Pedrosa’s expansion of the term to include diasporic communities is an important development, which will be further discussed in the conclusion to this essay.
Art fairs are, in principle, commercially focussed. Art Dubai is managed by the Art Dubai Group, a commercial public/private partnership established in 2007. But Art Dubai, especially in its early years, was genuinely more about contributing to the building of an arts ecosystem in Dubai and there has always been an emphasis on non-commercial programming, such as the aforementioned Marker section. The Global Art Forum, the fair’s flagship talks and thought-leadership programme has grown alongside the fair since 2007, promoting critical discourse and conversation from a distinctly Global South point of view. Today, the fair’s non-profit initiatives have expanded further to include Art Dubai Commissions, a platform that invites artists to produce site-specific works; the A.R.M. Holding Children’s Programme, which brings together artists and designers to closely collaborate with local schools through bespoke workshops; Campus Art Dubai, a year-round programme that aims to provide existing and aspiring members of the region’s cultural and creative community with educational and professional opportunities; and Art Salon, aimed at engaging and nurturing a new generation of collecting audiences in the UAE, among others. The group also works closely with government entities to develop new ideas that positively contribute to Dubai’s cultural landscape, including Dubai Collection—the first institutional collection for the city of Dubai, inviting patrons to loan works to the city; and Dubai Public Art, which sees the city’s top institutions working with local artists on new works for the public realm.
The A.R.M. Holding Children’s Programme, for example, has its roots in the Sheikha Manal Little Artists Programme that was initiated in 2012. This programme aimed to engage younger audiences in the world of art through workshops developed and led by local and international artists, fostering creative thinking and expression. Today, the programme has grown into the largest such cultural education programme in the UAE, expanding to over 100 public, private and special education need schools across all seven Emirates, reaching at least 15,000 students each year. From the innovative approach of Kenyan artist Cyrus Kabiru and Swedish artist Jacob Dahlgren, who taught children how to transform everyday mundane objects into works of art, to the creative guidance provided by Studio Sain and led by designer duo Namuun Zimmermann and Martin Rigters, who inspired young minds to invent and explore sustainable solutions, the programme has seen influential creative thinkers share their passion with participants. In 2024, the Indian artist Sahil Naik will engage young children to envision better cities through workshops, inculcating a sense of critical thinking and social responsibility––all values we hold close to our heart. In the decades to come, we believe that we will see the fruits of this investment in the country’s younger generation, with greater numbers participating in the arts and perhaps even becoming artists themselves.
As for the fair itself, there are different levels of curation involved in the different sections. As with all fairs, the offering each year to some extent depends on who applies to take part. That being said, it is a year-round effort to build relationships with galleries and encourage them to apply. I choose the final gallery line up with guidance from other senior Art Dubai team members, a selection committee and the section curators. The decisions are based on many factors such as commerciality, booth proposal, and how one presentation may speak to another. As the Artistic Director, I see early on the themes and patterns that will emerge in each year’s fair based on the proposals we receive. There is a much tighter curation in the special recurring sections at Art Dubai: Modern, Bawwaba and Art Dubai Digital, which we launched in 2022 to bridge the gap between the traditional gallery and rapidly developing digital art landscapes.
Art Dubai is committed to rewriting and challenging the widely accepted, Western-centric art history canon, by telling the stories of art and artists from regions that have been overlooked or understudied. Comprising between ten and 15 galleries, the Modern section features presentations by the Global South's Modern masters. Previous iterations of the section, and its accompanying symposium programme, have focussed on 20th-century Modern masters from the Middle East and North Africa and their importance today; cultural hubs of the Global South, such as Baghdad, Beirut, Dakar and Lahore; and Modern art in the Gulf.
This year’s presentation is perhaps the most curated to date: it is organised by Dr. Christianna Bonin, who is an expert in Cold War-era cultures and global modernisms. It will look at some of the artists from the Middle East, Africa and South Asia who took part in cultural exchange programmes with the Soviet Union and how the experience shaped their works and careers. While much scholarship has been focused on the artistic movements of America and Europe (or so-called “West”) during this post-WWII period, much less has been written about the “East” or “South”, and even less on the international artists who visited as part of public initiatives. Dr. Bonin hopes that the section will throw a light on these untold but significant histories and shared artistic experiences, which played a pivotal role in shaping the forming of today’s Global South.
“Curating an art fair brings both challenges and opportunities particular to the format,” says Dr. Bonin. “A curated art fair can communicate a focused idea to audiences, conveying meaning that might otherwise get lost among the glamorous hubbub of the marketplace and the thrill of sales.” Dr. Bonin also describes the balancing act of curating for a commercial fair: “I was conscious that both the galleries and the fair organisers have financial investments and desired outcomes,” she says. “For example, an artist might fit into my curatorial framework but it may not be the galley's bestseller.” But she argues that this is one of the reasons why curated sections are so important at fairs: “They add symbolic and historical value to the market context, as well as a chance to discover artists who have otherwise remained on the sidelines of the market and/or art history,” she says. “Many regulars to art fairs worldwide (myself included) will complain about the increasing flatness and sameness among them. But if there is one thing the art world can agree upon, it’s the shared love of novelty. Novelty is what the curated section of a fair can offer.”
The Modern section this year demonstrates perfectly what curated art fairs can offer: the ability to bring in academic expertise; to showcase under-exhibited artists and regions; to contribute to understudied areas of art historical scholarship; to collaborate with local and regional institutions; and to bring all of them within the remit of the art market.
In response to a growing Web3 community in Dubai and the wider Global South, Art Dubai launched its Digital section in 2022, aiming to navigate and interpret the digital art wave that had by then become a global phenomenon. Art Dubai was the first fair to take this leap into the future and expand the definition and understanding of contemporary art by presenting some of the most exciting and innovative artists working in the digital space today, selected by expert curators. This year’s curators are Alfredo Cramerotti and Auronda Scalera, co-directors of IAM-Infinity Art Museum in the metaverse and Multiplicity-XXNFT curatorial and publishing platform. They have carefully organised the section to challenge one of the main issues in this field: the predominance of male artists. While this is not a problem limited to the realm of digital art, it is more keenly felt in a medium that is comparatively new. “It has been a constant thread in our work and we work hard to ensure that there is a balanced representation of women artists in our exhibitions. As in other parts of art history, there can be a tendency towards the promotion of white, Western male artists and so we actively work to bring in diversity in the digital art field,” Cramerotti and Scalera say. There are a number of galleries in Art Dubai Digital 2024 who will be showing only women artists.
The Bawwaba section, which means “gateway” in Arabic, was created in 2019 to shed light on artist interrogations of the notion of the Global South and it spotlights artists from the Middle East, Africa, Central and South Asia, and Latin America. The Mumbai-based cultural theorist Nancy Adajania, who curated the section in 2020, astutely described it: “[The word Bawwaba] suggests acts of traversal and kinesis, of welcoming an interplay of familiarity and surprise. Its symbolism does away with the fixities of the centre-periphery model—which retains a phantom presence in the global art world, despite having been dethroned by Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11 (2002), with its emphasis on post-colonial ‘off-sites’ of contemporary art-making and nomadic discursive platforms, a breakthrough moment in global exhibition history [...] This is why I was intrigued by the promise of Bawwaba to bear witness to the ‘off-sites’ without creating an implicit binary between artistic positions from the West and the so-called ‘non-West’.” This year, the section is curated by Emiliano Valdés, and the associate curator for the 10th Gwangju Biennale. The ten solo presentations will showcase artists from the Global South who think of art as a place of reckoning and healing, confronting social and political issues, engaging in critical dialogue, and creating a sense of community and belonging. In many ways, Bawwaba was the start of Art Dubai’s own interrogations and self reflection on the term Global South.
At Art Dubai, we are constantly innovating. We are responding to the changes that we are witnessing in the region and the art scene and, therefore, are debating whether the term Global South is still the right way to frame our cultural community. “I find that conversations are shifting more towards regions and networks, rather than a category like Global South, which is almost becoming unwieldy in the amount of histories, cultures, and economies that it encompasses,” Bonin agrees. More and more, we are experiencing the same expansion of communities that Pedrosa describes in his curatorial statement for the Venice Biennale 2024. In amongst the geographies of Global South, how do we represent the “foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, émigrés, exiled, and refugees” who, alarmingly, are growing in numbers every year? The Global South is a constant site of conflict and displacement. When artists move and settle outside of this region, do they no longer qualify as belonging to the concept that once supported them and brought them together? As Dubai itself becomes the long-term country of residence for many migrants, this feels all the more pertinent.
Increasingly, I see proposals from young artists who, for example, are North Africans living on the outskirts of Paris or second generation immigrant artists who are still tied to the heritage of their parents. What about in California, which is home to so many national groups—Indian, Bangladeshi, Iranian—who are aspiring to “make it” in Los Angeles? Do these communities––the “diaspora” as we call them––belong to the Global South? Some of the most exciting work in contemporary art is coming from these kinds of artists, but the limitations of a geographic term may be preventing us from knowing them, or showing them.
We don’t yet know how to articulate this borderless concept, or if there is a way to redefine the term Global South to be more inclusive of our migratory world. But the team at Art Dubai will continue to grapple with it, just as our fair will continue to use curation as a tool to highlight underappreciated artists and practices, to promote and improve creative education and career opportunities; and ultimately, challenge Western-centric art history.
Art Dubai 2025 will take place from 18 to 20 April, 2025 (Preview Days on Wednesday, 16 and Thursday, 17 April).
Pablo del Val is the artistic director at Art Dubai and has decades of experience as a cultural manager, curator, and director of contemporary art galleries around the world. He has lived and worked in countries including Spain and Mexico, before he moved to Dubai in 2015 to work with the Art Dubai team. Del Val oversees the curatorial vision of the fair and the international collector’s programme. Del Val’s career has taken him all over the world, managing and directing multiple galleries and art fairs. He was instrumental in the launch of La Conservera as Founder, Director, and Curator, where he curated exhibitions by Loris Gréaud, Mickalene Thomas, Valentin Carron, Eva Rothschild, Lily van der Stokker, Diana Al-Hadid, Matthew Ronay and Xavierr Veihlan among others. Del Val was Director at international art fairs such as Expoarte Guadalajara, sparking the internationalisation of Mexico as a contemporary art hub. Following this, he held the position of artist director at Zona Maco for five years, before moving to Dubai.
Notes
[1] Marc Spiegler, “The globalisation of the art market, the rise of mega galleries and proliferation of art fairs is putting strain on young artists, even while they reap the rewards”, The Art Newspaper, 1 February 2004, accessed 20 December 2023, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2004/02/01/the-globalisation-of-the-art-market-the-rise-of-mega-galleries-and-proliferation-of-art-fairs-is-putting-strain-on-young-artists-even-while-they-reap-the-rewards
[2] Jerry Saltz, “Saltz on the Trouble With Mega-Galleries”, Vulture, 13 October 2013, accessed 20 December 2023, https://www.vulture.com/2013/10/trouble-with-mega-art-galleries.html