When Art Dubai opens its Special Edition at Madinat Jumeirah from 15–17 May 2026, with a VIP preview on 14 May, the fair will not simply mark two decades of existence. It will also reveal how profoundly the geography of the contemporary art world has shifted over the past twenty years. Once positioned largely as a regional marketplace, Art Dubai has increasingly evolved into a global cultural platform where conversations between Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and their diasporas unfold outside the traditional gravitational pull of Europe and the United States. This year’s modified special edition, conceived around resilience, collaboration, and regional interconnectedness, arrives at a moment when Dubai itself continues to redefine its role within international cultural circulation.
The special edition brings together around 75 presentations spanning contemporary, modern, and digital practices, alongside installations, performances, screenings, and institutional collaborations with organizations including Alserkal Avenue, Art Jameel, Sharjah Art Foundation, and the Barjeel Art Foundation. Yet among the fair’s most compelling threads is the strong presence of African artists and galleries from across the continent and its global diaspora. Rather than appearing as isolated inclusions, these artists occupy central positions within the fair’s intellectual and visual framework, reflecting broader shifts in how African contemporary art now operates within global discourse—not as peripheral commentary, but as a defining force shaping conversations around memory, materiality, identity, technology, migration, and historical reconstruction.
Rather than relying on spectacle alone, many of the African presentations at this year’s fair focus on tactility, inherited knowledge systems, archival memory, and material transformation. Across photography, textile installation, sculpture, abstraction, and digital experimentation, the artists presented reveal the extraordinary breadth of contemporary African and diasporic practices today. From Senegal and Ghana to Cameroon, Mali, Morocco, Egypt, Algeria, and beyond, Art Dubai’s Special Edition positions African artists not at the margins of the conversation, but at its center.
Galleries and Artists to Watch at Art Dubai Special Edition 2026
• Galerie Atiss Dakar
In collaboration with Space Un (Tokyo), Galerie Atiss Dakar presents one of the fair’s most materially driven presentations, bringing together artists whose practices investigate transformation, inscription, memory, and the symbolic possibilities embedded within matter itself. Wood, bronze, pigment, metal, and textured surfaces become carriers of gesture, labor, and inherited craft knowledge, collapsing distinctions between sculpture, object-making, ritual, and conceptual practice.
Artists Presented:
- Serigne Mbaye Camara (Senegal)
Camara’s practice explores abstraction through densely layered surfaces and sculptural interventions rooted in Senegalese visual culture and material experimentation. His works often investigate tactile memory, erosion, and transformation, allowing materials themselves to become active participants within the narrative of the work.
- Makhone Diop (Senegal)
Diop engages found and everyday materials through processes shaped by repetition, accumulation, and artisanal traditions. His practice reflects on how objects move between practical utility and symbolic resonance, carrying traces of labor, spirituality, and cultural continuity.
- Tessi Kodjovi (Togo)
Kodjovi’s work navigates rhythm, density, and inscription through surfaces informed by embodied making processes and West African craft traditions. His practice frequently explores how repetition and texture can operate as forms of visual language.
- Koffi Kugbe Kukoff (Togo)
Kukoff approaches material experimentation as a conceptual process, using texture, form, and surface to question conventional boundaries between sculpture, design, and objecthood. His works often carry a strong architectural and tactile sensibility.
Together, the presentation reflects on the evolving relationship between materiality, memory, and contemporary African artistic production.
• Galleria Continua
Galleria Continua presents a focused dialogue between Cameroonian artist Pascale Marthine Tayou and Italian conceptual artist Michelangelo Pistoletto, examining circulation, accumulation, spirituality, and the movement of objects across cultures and histories.
Artists Presented:
- Pascale Marthine Tayou (Cameroon)
One of Africa’s most internationally recognized contemporary artists, Tayou presents Fetish Wall, an immersive installation composed of thousands of colorful rusted nails spread across the exhibition space. Transforming discarded industrial materials into a monumental sculptural environment, the work evokes systems of exchange, migration, ritual practice, and global consumption. Tayou’s practice consistently moves between humor, critique, spirituality, and hybridity, reflecting on the complexities of postcolonial identity and transnational circulation.
• Balice Hertling
For Art Dubai’s Special Edition, Balice Hertling presents a group exhibition exploring how images, materials, and objects accumulate memory and cultural residue across time. The presentation brings together artists whose practices move fluidly between abstraction, symbolism, mythology, and historical layering.
Artists Presented:
Rafik Greiss (Egypt/Ireland)
Rafik Greiss’s multidisciplinary practice investigates memory, displacement, and the emotional charge carried within objects and images. Working across painting, sculpture, and installation, Greiss often constructs fragmented visual environments where personal history intersects with broader questions of migration, identity, and belonging. His works frequently engage material surfaces as sites of accumulation, erosion, and psychic residue, reflecting the layered experiences of diasporic existence.
The presentation positions Greiss alongside artists whose practices similarly explore the instability of meaning and the circulation of visual languages across geographies and histories.
• Efie Gallery
Efie Gallery presents one of the most expansive African and diasporic presentations at Art Dubai’s Special Edition, bringing together artists from Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Mali, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Cuba. Through photography, textiles, sculpture, archival practices, and material experimentation, the presentation explores migration, memory, ecology, identity, spirituality, and the movement of cultures across geographies. The booth reflects Efie Gallery’s growing position as one of the leading platforms championing contemporary African and diasporic artistic practices from the Gulf region.
Artists Presented:
- María Magdalena Campos-Pons (Cuba)
Campos-Pons presents Mar Pacífico del Jardín de Amparo (2025), a triptych examining interconnected histories between Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East through flora, fauna, and ecological symbolism. Her work reflects on migration, spirituality, displacement, and the persistence of diasporic memory.
- Samuel Fosso (Cameroon)
Fosso presents works from his iconic 70’s Lifestyle series (1974–1978), where self-portraiture becomes performance, roleplay, and historical reconstruction. Drawing inspiration from African American and West African cultural icons, the works interrogate Black identity, aspiration, masculinity, and photography’s role in self-fashioning.
- Abdoulaye Konaté (Mali)
Konaté exhibits large-scale textile works including Tombouctou-motifs (2023), continuing his long-standing engagement with political instability, spirituality, environmental concerns, and social fragmentation through layered dyed cloth compositions. His monumental textile installations have become central to conversations around the expansion of textile practices within contemporary art.
- Kelani Abass (Nigeria)
Abass works across photography, printmaking, sculpture, and archival interventions, examining how systems of image-making shape memory, authority, and historical consciousness. His practice frequently draws from colonial-era archives, vernacular photography, and family histories to interrogate questions of nationhood, identity, and visual representation in postcolonial Nigeria.
- J.K. Bruce Vanderpuije (Ghana)
A foundational figure in Ghanaian photography, Vanderpuije contributes historical photographs including Accra Optimists Club (1930s), offering rare non-colonial representations of twentieth-century Ghanaian society. His images remain significant documents of urban life, self-fashioning, and social identity in pre- and post-independence Ghana.
- Yaw Owusu (Ghana)
Owusu presents Heart of Place (2022), a sculptural installation composed of metals and coins sourced from Ghana, the UAE, and the United States. The work reflects on extraction, labor, migration, and the unstable systems through which value is assigned to materials and economies. Owusu is also among the artists commissioned for large-scale installations integrated across the fair grounds.
- Aïda Muluneh (Ethiopia)
Muluneh’s visually striking photographic works combine bold color palettes, symbolism, and carefully staged compositions to examine identity, womanhood, spirituality, and social perception. Her practice frequently draws from Ethiopian visual traditions while addressing broader questions surrounding African representation and global image culture.
- Maggie Otieno (Kenya)
Otieno’s practice explores memory, materiality, and contemporary African life through works that often balance intimacy with broader social reflection. Her presentation contributes to the booth’s wider dialogue around cultural identity, lived experience, and evolving forms of visual storytelling across the continent.
• GVCC
GVCC presents a group exhibition foregrounding material experimentation, digital culture, anatomy, and contemporary Moroccan conceptual practice.
Artists Presented:
- Hassan Mannana (Morocco)
Mannana describes himself as a conceptual anthropologist. His work explores anatomy, biology, morphology, and sensory experience through tactile and olfactory materials, examining tensions between traditional forms and contemporary material experimentation.
- Soufiane Idrissi (Morocco)
Idrissi is regarded as a leading figure within Morocco’s Post-Internet movement. His work interrogates digital culture, online image circulation, and contemporary systems of visibility. He recently achieved a record result at Christie’s in December 2025.
- Mehdi Melhaoui (Morocco)
Melhaoui’s multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, woodworking, found objects, bronze, steel, photography, and installation. His work often navigates themes of accumulation, transformation, and material memory through assemblage-based approaches.
- Yacout Kabbaj (Morocco)
Kabbaj employs glitch aesthetics, fragmentation, and digital disruption to challenge dominant systems of globalization, gender representation, and social control. Her practice reframes visual error as a space of liberation and reconstruction.
• Mark Hachem Gallery
Mark Hachem Gallery presents a focused historical presentation examining key figures within twentieth-century Arab modernism.
Artists Presented:
- Hamed Abdalla (Egypt)
One of the pioneers of modern Egyptian art, Abdalla developed a distinctive visual language he termed “word-shapes,” merging abstraction with Arabic calligraphy. His practice fused politics, spirituality, identity, and language, helping redefine the possibilities of modern Arab abstraction during the mid-twentieth century. Abdalla’s work remains foundational within the histories of Egyptian, African, and Middle Eastern modernism.
• Galerie Lilia Ben Salah
As part of Art Dubai’s digital focus, Galerie Lilia Ben Salah presents an intergenerational dialogue exploring technology, memory, exile, fragmentation, and image-making across different political and historical contexts.
Artists Presented:
- Zoulikha Bouabdellah (Algeria/France)
Bouabdellah’s multidisciplinary practice examines migration, postcolonial identity, gender politics, religion, and digital culture through installation, video, sculpture, and conceptual interventions. Her work often destabilizes stereotypes surrounding Arab and North African femininity while interrogating the visual structures through which power and identity are constructed.
What becomes especially striking across Art Dubai’s Special Edition is not simply the number of African artists participating, but the complexity and diversity of their practices. These presentations move beyond simplistic framings of African art and instead foreground artists working across conceptual abstraction, textile installation, archival photography, sculpture, digital experimentation, and socially embedded research.
As Art Dubai marks its twentieth anniversary, the prominence of African and diasporic artists within the fair signals a broader transformation within the global art ecosystem. Increasingly, conversations shaping contemporary art are no longer moving exclusively through Europe and North America, but through interconnected cultural geographies spanning Africa, the Gulf, Asia, and Latin America. At Art Dubai 2026, that shift is fully visible.
