DUBAI
The first encounter with Sudarshan Shetty’s work at Art Dubai’s 20th edition feels less like being at an art fair and more like walking into a dream. A temple-like structure with carved wooden surfaces and a pool with flowers strewn on its surface dominate a monumental platform. Titled ‘A Story and A Song’, visitors instinctively pause, lingering in silence far longer than they do elsewhere at the fair.
Held from May 15–17 at Madinat Jumeirah, the fair’s special edition opened this year in the shadow of geopolitical tensions. Yet, inside Shetty’s installation, the noise of war briefly dissolved into something more intimate: memory, absence and longing.
The work became one of the defining presentations at Art Dubai this year, combining sculpture, sound, moving image and performance. “It creates a space where music, cinema, performance and folklore intersect, drawing on forms outside canonical art history to question how time, place and inherited knowledge are understood,” said Shetty.
The emotional resonance of the installation felt especially powerful in Dubai—a city shaped by migration, reinvention and impermanence.
That tension between fragility and resilience shaped much of this year’s works at Art Dubai. The organisers had to shift the fair from April to May because of the Middle East conflict. They also adopted a scaled-back format with free public entry—the first in two decades.
Even so, the fair brought together 55 galleries, more than 500 participants and over 300 artists from around the world. The mood was quieter than previous editions, with less emphasis on drama and greater focus on dialogue and reflection.
That atmosphere extended beyond the main halls into Alserkal Avenue, the industrial arts district that has become a major centre for contemporary art in the city. One of the striking aspects of this year’s edition was the strong visibility of Indian and South Asian artists despite the absence of Indian galleries.
Nearly a dozen Indian artists were featured in the fair and its parallel programming, underscoring the country’s growing influence within the Gulf’s cultural landscape. Alongside Shetty, artists like Shilpa Gupta, Mithu Sen and Vikram Divecha explored themes of migration, borders, labour and identity—concerns deeply intertwined with Dubai’s own social fabric.
Gupta’s installation, ‘Still A Sky We Hold’, presented at Alserkal Avenue, emerged as one of the most quietly affecting works. Using mirrored surfaces, illuminated text and shifting reflections, the installation invited viewers to physically move around it to decipher its fragmented message. The repeated use of the word “still” functioned simultaneously as pause, endurance and uncertainty.
“The work also speaks to borders, belonging, language and mobility,” Gupta said. “These are questions that resonate naturally in Dubai, a city shaped by migration and layered identities.”
If Gupta examined invisible borders, Divecha turned to the hidden infrastructure governing everyday life in the Gulf. Known for transforming overlooked systems—labour patterns, transport routes and construction processes—into conceptual interventions, Divecha’s work explored the invisible mechanisms and unseen labour underpinning modern cities.
His ‘Gardeners’ Sketchbooks’ (2017), where he collaborated with public gardeners from Sharjah, showed how the gardeners’ own creativity and imagination existed alongside the official design and management of the landscape.
Some of the most compelling conversations at Art Dubai unfolded through the work of South Asian women artists. At Warehouse 51 in Alserkal Avenue, Richi Bhatia presented ‘Suitcase Lineages: Parallel Movement, Isolation and Dispatches’, an ambitious project tracing matrilineal histories across India, Pakistan, Germany and the UAE through textiles, documents, oral histories and assemblages. Nearby, Mumbai-based Meher Afroz Vahid presented visceral mixed-media works examining flesh, fragility and transformation through unusual materials, including frozen blood on meat packaging, fish muscle textures and decaying organic surfaces. Her installations positioned the body itself as an archive of migration, labour and ecological vulnerability.
“South Asian women artists are increasingly shaping some of the most compelling conversations in contemporary art today,” said Malini Gulrajani, founder of 1X1 Art Gallery in Dubai. “Their practices often move fluidly across themes of migration, memory, identity, labour, ecology, gender, and inherited histories. Dubai’s position at the crossroads of South Asia, the Middle East and the global art world gives these practices particular resonance.”
Hovering above all these conversations was the larger question quietly defining this year’s Art Dubai: can art bring people together and display the power of community during times of geopolitical turbulence?
For organisers, the answer lay partly in continuity itself. “Art Dubai has championed the artists, galleries and collectors who have been key to the growth of the cultural sector in the region,” said Benedetta Ghione, executive director, Art Dubai Group. “It is these relationships that have come together to demonstrate how a sense of resilience can lead to exceptional collaborations.”
Ghione noted that Dubai today is home to more than 40 commercial galleries, major international auction houses and an expanding collector base, positioning the city as an increasingly important global cultural hub.
That resilience was visible throughout the week—not through extravagance, but through persistence. And perhaps nowhere was that spirit more powerfully distilled than inside Shetty’s quietly haunting installation, where visitors stood motionless beneath suspended wooden forms, listening for meaning in the space between story and song.