“Rain is the property of the Israeli authorities and thus Palestinians are forbidden from gathering rainwater for domestic or agricultural needs,” said Shumon Basar, the director of Art Dubai’s Global Art Forum talks programme, at the fair’s opening press conference on 28 February.
Basar, who was quoting an Israeli military order from 2009, verified by Amnesty International and republished by the United Nations, is this week guiding a series of panel discussions touching upon the ecological impact of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. It is one of a number of gestures at the 17th edition of Art Dubai (until 3 March) to foreground the ongoing crisis in Palestine—particularly in Gaza, where more than 30,000 people have been killed in the past five months, according to the Gaza ministry of health (MOH), following Hamas’s 7 October terrorist attacks in Israel in which around 1,200 people reportedly died and 253 people were taken hostage.
“Palestine has been part of Art Dubai’s DNA since day one,” says the fair’s artistic director, Pablo del Val. Art Dubai’s owners, the Art Dubai Group (ADG), will donate 25% of pre-fair ticket sale proceeds to the Emirates Red Crescent, affiliated with the Red Cross, “to support its winter campaign for vulnerable communities in the region”, a fair spokesperson says. The pledge follows a similar one made by ADG in October 2023 for its Downtown Design fair, “in response to the devastating events occurring in Gaza”, according to a statement. In 2022, the fair donated, via Unicef, the same amount of Art Dubai pre-fair ticket sales to Ukrainians affected by the Russian invasion.
As with previous editions, two Palestinian galleries are participating in this year’s Art Dubai, which returns to the plush halls of the Madinat Jumeirah resort complex. Zawyeh gallery, which has spaces in Ramallah, in the West Bank, as well as Dubai, has brought works by three Palestinian artists. They include brightly coloured prints of watermelons—a widely recognised and circulated symbol of Palestinian resistance—by the Ramallah-based artist Khaled Hourani. Each print is on sale for $2,800; seven had sold by the end of the second VIP day (29 February).
Another body of work on Zawyeh’s stand to directly address the crisis is a group of new prints by the Gaza-born, Dubai-based artist Saher Nassar. These are cartoon-like depictions of jarring scenes, such as land being watered with blood and a small human figure emerging from an egg, surrounded by a warning sign. The latter references “Israel’s destruction of Palestinian youth”, says the gallery’s director, Ziad Anani (the MOH estimates that as of 25 February around 12,500 children have been killed in Gaza during the ongoing Israel-Hamas war). The artist’s family home in Gaza was also destroyed during the recent bombings, Anani adds. He notes that shipping work back to Palestine will be extremely difficult: “Israeli forces will often damage the work intentionally or simply throw it away, you have no idea if you’ll get it back intact.”
For Samar Martha, the owner of Gallery One, also from Ramallah, getting to the fair from Palestine was “a journey from hell that took 24 hours, with multiple checkpoint stops”. She carried most of the works shown on the stand in her hand luggage and framed them in Dubai, as she was “unable to ship anything out of Palestine”. Her gallery is showing a glass sculpture, videos and prints by Manal Mahamid, including a 2024 silk screen work depicting 48 desert cactuses encircled by the names of villages destroyed in 1948, when around 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes by Israeli forces, an event known as the Nakba (Arabic for “disaster”).
The gallery has sold works from the stand to Lebanese, British and Emirati collectors, Martha says—a vital lifeline as “art buying in Ramallah has completely stopped due to the war”. She casts doubts as to whether she could show a stand so explicitly focused on Palestinian struggles at a number of major art fairs in the Global North. “It would be different at Art Basel or Frieze.”
The relative ease of supporting Palestinian causes in the Gulf region is echoed by the dealer Sunny Rahbar, the director of The Third Line in Dubai. “In this case, galleries here find it easier to be on the right side of history,” she says. On the stand is a self-portrait by the late Palestinian-Kuwaiti photographer Tarek Al-Ghoussein, in which he wears a keffiyeh, an Arab headdress that has become associated with Palestinian resistance movements.
A number of other non-Palestinian galleries are ensuring that the war in Gaza remains present at the fair. Jeddah’s Athr has a solo presentation by the Saudi-Palestinian artist Ayman Daydban of found objects, such as magazines and chewing gum wrappers, as well as large metal sheets—all folded and then partially unfolded so the creases match the lines of the Palestinian flag. The metal works are priced between $12,000 to $15,500.
Nika Project Space, a recently established gallery in Dubai, has brought a large ceramic kitchen installation by the Palestinian artist Mirna Bamieh that refers to the occupation and its disastrous effects on local food and farming. It is priced at €150,000. And Vadehra Gallery, from New Delhi, is showing two paintings by the Amsterdam-based Indian artist Praneet Soi that juxtapose a view of a playground with one of a Gazan landscape.
From Dana Awartani's ongoing series Let Me Mend Your Broken Bones, shown at Art Dubai by Chemould Prescott Road
© Chemould Prescott Road
One of the most explicit references to the war is found on the stand of Chemould Prescott Road, from Mumbai, which has brought textile works by the Palestinian artist Dana Awartani, a new signing to the gallery. For her ongoing series Let Me Mend Your Broken Bones, the artist darns fragile, diaphanous silk and stretches it over a frame. Each work relates to a heritage site in Gaza that has been destroyed by “Israeli occupying forces”, as explained by texts hanging alongside each piece naming the damaged sites. Two of these works, each priced at $21,000, have been sold to Emirati collectors. Shireen Gandhy, the gallery’s director, says she intends to bring these works to Art Basel later this year. “Let’s see what they have to say.”
The robust presence of Palestinian issues—both past and present—across the fair is notable at a time when art institutions and commercial spaces across the US, Europe and other countries are facing mounting censorship in addressing the war in Gaza. A director at the Dubai gallery Tabari Art Space, which is showing two $35,000 paintings by Tagreed Darghouth depicting olive trees felled by Israeli forces on Palestinian farm land, says that the gallery has been particularly compelled to foreground Palestinian voices after “shows by Palestinian artists began getting cancelled overseas”, following the 7 October attack.
Art Dubai’s willingness and ability to promote Palestinian voices chimes with a strategy that the fair has pursued since its inception: to serve as a platform for art from underrepresented geographies. Since he joined the fair as artistic director nine years ago, Del Val says that he has pushed to shift focus away from the West, to naturally “reflect the diversity of Dubai”.
Still, Western attention on the Gulf is important for business and this year, the fair anticipated more high-profile visitors than ever, due to the wealth of art events taking place in the region this past week. These include the opening of the Diriyah Biennial and Desert X Al Ula, both in Saudi Arabia, the Doha Design Biennial and culture summits in Abu Dhabi and Sharjah. “The Gulf feels like China did in the early 2000s,” says Alexandra Fain, the director of the Asia Now fair in Paris. “Everything is happening here.”
Such buzz has not necessarily translated into rapid sales at the fair, however, with many gallerists remarking that business so far has been slow, although not without promise. Top sales reported from the two VIP days include El Anatsui’s large 2022 sculpture at Efie Gallery (Dubai), to a Dubai collector for $600,000, and a Lynda Benglis sculpture at Thomas Brambilla (Bergamo) for €160,000 to a Lebanese collector. Meanwhile, the fair’s Digital section, which returns for the third time, has seen sales of Krista Kim's light-based work 10005 v1 for 12.5ETH ($42,600).
Most dealers approached by The Art Newspaper whose programmes focus heavily on Palestine said that sales have increased in the past few months as collectors look for ways to support artists most affected by the crisis. "People don't know what to do at this time," Anani says. "This is a way to do something".
Speaking at Art Dubai, the academic Reema Salha Fadda notes that circulating images of the devastation on the ground has long been a key strategy of the Palestinian struggle against occupation. "The art world tends to put an optimistic sheen on things. But to show these images, to sit with them uncomfortably, is resistance."