Sunday 31 / August / 2025
Abu Dhabi: Artists from Oman could feature at the next edition of Abu Dhabi Art, which looks at bringing together cultures from the GCC nations and the broader Arab World, as they look to unearth their shared past and the cultural and social issues that all nations in the region face.
Abu Dhabi Art, which is marking its 10th anniversary this year, features exhibits from 43 galleries across 19 countries, and Dyala Nusseibeh, the director of Abu Dhabi Art at the Department of Culture and Tourism, says they are looking at Omani artists and researchers coming to future events, having already been present at previous versions of the fair.
“We are now entering the 10th edition of Abu Dhabi Art, so we are celebrating a decade this year,” she told the Times of Oman. “We would love to collaborate with Omani artists in the future. I remember last year, we had Aisha Stoby come; she is a researcher from Oman and she did a series of talks around different artistic movements in Oman, and this is an area we would love to explore further.”
Another Omani artist who has previously featured is Radhika Khimji, and Nusseibeh says art is about making connections across cultures.
“It is really about connecting people,” added Nusseibeh. “It’s about artists and professionals from here connecting with international counterparts, so there’s an element of exposure in providing a platform for works to be seen. That’s really what we try and do. Here in the UAE, the government, the leadership has put culture at the heart of what it wishes to achieve for the country. It really is important for artists to pursue their passion full-time and not be afraid to really go for it.”
Artists from several other GCC nations, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain will be present at this year’s Abu Dhabi Art, and Mohammed Hafiz, co-founder of Jeddah-based Athr Gallery and vice-chairman of the Saudi Art Council, says young people across the Arab world are now asking the same questions with regards to their culture, given the relatively young ages of their modern nations, and the influx of Western influences and ideas.
My children, at home, mostly choose to speak English and not Arabic because they are influenced by Netflix and other things, and this sometimes leads to them asking where our culture and roots are from, and it is challenging to deal with them,” he explained. “It discusses some of the very relevant challenges we go through as the younger generation in this part of the world. Between Saudi Arabia and the UAE, for example, it is the same upbringing and challenges."
Athr Gallery’s showpiece exhibit – in addition to the others on display – deals with how the Arabic language actually has more meaning than what actually meets the eye, in an effort to show people more of the Arab culture than is normally perceived.
“We broke it down into six topics and grouped the 28 letters of Arabic into these kind of overarching main titles, and curated the exhibition with the works of Saudi and Emirati artists,” explains Hafiz. “Their work was mostly from discussions and reactions to the challenges shown in some of the works. One of the works for example, talks about the dual landscape and the travels and the issues that take place after 9/11 and how they impact our generation and how they reflect on what they believe and know about themselves and their characters, and how they are perceived from the outside world.”
With youngsters in the region increasingly taking to technology, Egyptian artist Tarek Abou El Fetouh decided to merge technology with art to give people a deeper understanding into the issues in the region.
“One of our artists was interested in covering the war in Iraq, and he worked with this young Iraqi guy, discovering his memories as a child during his war in Iraq, so this is a virtual reality performance and you can see the world through the eyes of this guy; it is an incredible experience,” he said. “Another one of our artists worked with communities that install big speakers in their cars; they actually transformed their cars into a big speaker, and these exist within every single city. He used the speakers in these cars as his sound system.”
