Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, a new ARTnews series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world.
Abu Dhabi Art Fair returns to the capital city of the United Arab Emirates next month for its 17th edition, more cosmopolitan than ever, yet consistent in character.
From November 19–23, some 140 galleries from 37 countries will descend on Saadiyat Island, up from last year’s 104 galleries and well beyond the 40 some exhibitors that gathered together in 2009 for its first edition. Under the leadership of Dyala Nusseibeh, the fair has launched a range of thematic sectors, including “The Collectors Salon,” for artifacts, historical objects, and the like; the newly expanded “Emerge,” dedicated to galleries that sell works priced under $3,000; and the Global Focus, which this year will showcase modern masters from Nigeria and Türkiye, which will help illuminate the under-studied historical ties between Arab artists and the wider world.
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It’s an apt encapsulation of the cultural strategy deployed to seismic effect by Abu Dhabi’s leadership over the past 20 years: build ambitiously and smartly, and the world will take notice—then shape the narrative that follows. Change is constant in the United Arab Emirates, and its closest cultural and commercial peers, Doha and Riyadh. Their shared art ecosystem, however, is poised for its greatest evolution yet: In 2026, Frieze will officially take over Abu Dhabi Art, rebranding as Frieze Abu Dhabi—just as Qatar welcomes Art Basel, marking the first branches of both multinational entities in the Gulf Cooperation Council.
ARTnews spoke with Nusseibeh about the region’s imminent art market shakeup, and for further details on the upcoming Abu Dhabi Art.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.
ARTnews: Abu Dhabi Art has grown considerably since it launched 2016, in terms of exhibitors and satellite events across the Emirate. What factors do you attribute to this growth?
Dyala Nusseibeh: This constellation of museums are finally coming to fruition on Saayidat, many of which have been in the works for nearly two decades. There’s been a lot of work on curatorial strategy, acquisitions, knowledge production—all of that has fed into the burgeoning art market in the region in significant ways.
I would say we’re sort of riding a little bit of a wave in terms of global geopolitics, economics, all of that. The Gulf is actually a very stable place, in terms of its economy. There is a lot of investment happening in culture at a time where elsewhere it’s slowing down. A lot of galleries are looking for new markets and seeing the Gulf as this exciting sort of landscape to be part of. And so [at the fair] we’re seeing both the return of some of those early exhibitors that came out in the first editions of the fair, galleries such as Pace Gallery, Mennour, and of course, Galleria Continua. But we also have newcomers like Richard Saltoun.
How has the fair responded to this change?
Initially the fair [featured] more blue-chip galleries together, with some of the large regional galleries. In recent years, there’s been a very carefully built-up space for emerging and mid-career galleries to play a central part, to be stakeholders in the fair. That’s both on the ground, locally and regionally, but also globally. We’ve opened up the space for galleries that are building up their markets to see the UAE as a place where they can do that, and in Abu Dhabi in particular. One, through actively encouraging galleries to bring lower price point works for our growing collector base. We obviously have a core group of very serious, prominent collectors with important collections, but we also have this fantastic mobility and growth of younger collectors that have disposable income; that are beginning to seriously become the future collectors that galleries can turn to to help build their markets.
At the same time, we’ve focused on under-researched art histories, bringing [to the fair] artists that there is less known about, and so that are therefore perhaps undervalued in terms of their global peers. I’m thinking, for example, Egyptian surrealists like Inji Efflatoun. If you were trying to get a European Surrealist of a similar standing, you would pay multiple times the amount for a work by them. There’s this opportunity for collectors to start acquiring modern art from the region or from the Global South—or Global Majority, if you will.
How does that strategy tie into the fair’s partnership with other countries, like Nigeria?
This year, we’re actively working with the Nigerian Federal Ministry of Art, Culture, Tourism and Creative Economy to offer opportunities to different galleries in that particular Focus sector. They’re showing seven galleries.
One gallery is showing modern works from the Osogbo School of Art and the other six are all basically emerging and smaller galleries. I think Nigeria, like us, is thinking about the creative economy and the benefits of supporting that creative sector’s growth. We’re sort of pairing up and giving them the opportunity to enable that growth in the UAE. So that’s definitely part of the strategy: expanding the number of galleries and the entry points for those galleries, so they’re accessible to a wider collector base. We’re very much looking at the museums for guidance on works to bring [to the fair].
For example, a couple of years ago, we introduced the Collector Salon, where we showcase works that you can find in conversation with works at the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Last year, Peter Harrington brought the original manuscript of Le Petit Prince, with annotations by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. So we’ve started to bring in all sorts of collectibles, antiquities, artifacts, objects, manuscripts. I think that’s very, very much in step with this audience that’s grown up attending the Louvre Abu Dhabi now for seven, eight years. But equally with our focus on the SWANA [South West Asia, North Africa] region that’s inclining to the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi’s stated curatorial strategy and intention.
Samuel Nnorom, Showing Inner Colour, 2025.
Courtesy of The 1897 Gallery and the Artist
What sort of dialogues are being opened here?
kó [a Lagos-based gallery] has been doing the fair for a little bit, and through them we’ve got to know—or I’ve certainly got to know—a lot more about Nigerian modern art. One of their artists, Nike Davies-Okundaye, we loved meeting last year when she was shown at the booth. She was a key part of the Osogbo School of Art and she was married to [the artist] Twins Seven Seven who was certainly more well known until recently. They were part of this community of artists, writers, intellectuals, poets, and theater-makers that would create these kinds of theater backdrops and do this kind of traveling theater.
It was very much part of the post-colonial narratives coming out of Nigeria as they were taking ownership of their own art histories and imagining their own futures. I think [Davies-Okundaye] was the first female gallerist in Nigeria herself. She’s given job opportunities to 500 women in craft-making. She’s quite an inspiring person. That’s a long-winded way of saying, I think kó opened the door for me in a lot of ways to thinking about the connections, or possible links, with Nigeria. I mentioned earlier the Nigerian Federal Ministry of Art, Culture, Tourism and Creative Economy; you can see the priorities of the country in that government title. This idea that investing in the creative economy is essential for the future possibilities of Nigeria, that really resonated because we think in the same way in Abu Dhabi.
All this effort to build up the art ecosystem and the art economy is very much about that next generation having the possibility to contribute to the further growth of the country and to have the possibility of building careers in this field. We’re on similar missions in that way. And when you start thinking like that, it makes sense that you don’t have to immediately go for the kind of typical art centers globally—again, thinking about Europe and America—where the markets are deepest. I think everything’s a little bit more decentralized now.
How does Türkiye figure into that narrative?
One of the galleries that’s participating is showing Fahrelnissa Zeid. She’s such an obvious kind of connector, if you will, between our parts of the world. She was born during the Ottoman Empire, married and moved to Iraq. After being part of the D Grubu [artist collective] in Türkiye, she ended her years in Jordan, where she mentored a group of female artists. So she is this Turkish modern artist that is also very much a part of our world as well. We’re going to be showing some pretty special works by her from private collections that haven’t been seen in public.
What are the day-to-day logistics of staging a fair of this size? To say, what’s a normal work day for you?
I mean, it’s everything from the production timelines to schedules, and thinking about the layouts of galleries. My favorite thing is talking with artists and curators about what they’re showing. You learn about the artist, help them with their presentations, and think about the collector outreach. I’ll plan and go to events in Abu Dhabi to welcome people, a lot of them coming for the first time. I want to make sure that they have a wider sense of the Emirates and of the cultural landscape there.
Last week HSBC, our lead sponsor, showed our wonderful program Beyond Emerging Artists, where we commission three artists every year to create new work, which we show at the fair and then take internationally. Historically, we’ve shown it in Kochi and in Hong Kong. And last week, HSBC kindly supported our exhibition of the works at the Saatchi Gallery in London.
There’s also thinking about, say, where we can have booth walls and how to squeeze galleries in, because we’d like to [include] more than we can. I mean, I’ve literally got some of our youngest galleries going down a corridor, but that makes it quite exciting and buzzy. The galleries in that section last year actually sold really well. The fun part for me always is trying to understand some of the work the curators are doing around the exhibitions they’re presenting—the critical research that comes out of that. Specifically this year, I’m often in conversation with galleries about having to maybe change a booth, or they want to present something new. We really pay attention as a fair to what galleries show, and try to make it feel as much like an exhibition as possible, and not too chaotic or mixed of a hang.
So no two days are alike for you.
No, I don’t think so. I think there’s an occupational hazard especially with the lower price points, of always wanting to buy things.
In what ways have you seen your role—or your perspective on your role—change since you took the helm in 2016?
I knew from day one that the fair is as much a community as it is a platform; you often hear fairs described as platforms. So from the get-go, I was trying to understand the role the fair could have for the community, what it had done historically, and where it could go. Some of the changes strategically I wanted to implement were things like having a year-round presence, rather than just being a five-day event.
For example, doing exhibitions year round, doing talks in universities, having things like the Student Pavilion Prize and Beyond Emerging Artists, which gives young artists an opportunity to use the fair as a vehicle for their development. I think 10,000 students in total come to the fair, which is really important to me. There were lots of things I felt the fair could do beyond the sort of nuts and bolts of being a commercial art space, [for] knowledge production. Like, could we be somewhere where you did research about artists, or helped produce publications—and certainly we’ve done a bit of that with our gateway exhibitions at the fair. Warehouse421 became an important space to do a gallery week, mid-year, where we had galleries coming with works less than $3,000—as a way to build up a base for younger collectors. All of that for me was a huge learning curve, just thinking about what people wanted, what they responded to, what they were drawn to. There are so many people in Abu Dhabi—and this I think is a little bit unusual and unique—that take a real pride in supporting the development of their country’s creative economy.
What was it like staging the fair during the pandemic?
There was one year [around the pandemic] when we were online-only. We created a fair, free of charge for galleries to be online as our stakeholders. And there were plenty of collectors that hadn’t really gone online before—it was sort of new to them—but were so happy to have the VIP team go to people’s homes, open up laptops, show them how to enter these viewing rooms. There was a real sense of community spirit and desire to feel somehow contributing to the UAE’s opportunities and future possibilities. I would say that is quite unique.
The first iterations of Frieze Abu Dhabi and Art Basel Qatar will launch in 2026. How do you think these additions will affect the art ecosystem of the Gulf?
I think this is a hugely important chapter ahead of us. You’ve seen how we’re growing and growing: We’ve gone from 40 or so galleries to 140. Saudi launched an art fair in the spring which is going somewhere. Qatar signaled a serious interest with the Art Basel collaboration. And what that’s telling you is that we are entering a new growth period which is going to be good for everyone: the artists, the galleries, all the arts professionals. Growth across the region means an artist will have opportunities to exhibit across these countries. Curators will discover works through many events. Researchers will be able to access and think about information.
This a moment where the region is talking about itself in global art narratives and putting that information forward. And as much as things are coming to the Gulf, the Gulf is also going outward. For example, with Frieze Abu Dhabi, I think an important change is up to now, we’ve been very much a locally and regionally grounded fair that’s attracted international participants. I think that’s going to change in a meaningful way as we move [toward] Frieze Abu Dhabi 2026, where we’re entering more global conversations and bringing our own voices into those conversations, through the networks and expertise of Frieze. I’ve had the pleasure of working a little bit with them now. We just did a lounge at Frieze London [earlier this month], where we were hosting people and welcoming people. It’s been an absolute delight. They’re all brilliant, lovely, fantastic to work with.
London has been this kind of global center for exchange and trade, and people from all over the world have made it their home. You’ve seen this kind of acceleration of the art market and acceleration of the ecosystem over the years since [Frieze London] launched. And I think in some ways, Abu Dhabi is going through the same acceleration. It’s also a global hub, a financial center, a place where you’re seeing people from all over the world come and make it their home. It’s about to undergo, I think, quite an acceleration going forward, and the fair will have an integral part to play in that.
Anything else you’d like to highlight, as you prepare for the fair’s opening next month?
Abu Dhabi Art is a space for the art market, but it’s also a space for reflection and research on wider topics, and a kind of coming together of a much wider community as well. That’s where fairs can continue to have relevance. When they build up the art market, they’re also building up that knowledge around different art histories, and, you know, critical perspectives on some of the issues that are especially relevant today, or that we’re thinking about critically today, and we always try and be a fair that offers that potential.
