I n a cavernous warehouse on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi’s Mussafah industrial area, Emirati fiber artist Afra Al Dhaheri, 37, fashions thick strands of unraveled rope into a large-scale installation that resembles a monumental braid. It dangles from the ceiling as the former hairdresser and a cohort of assistants—many of them her students at Zayed University, where she’s an assistant professor—prepare her pieces to be shown in galleries and fairs, from Japan’s Aichi Triennale opening later this month to the Taipei Biennial in November.
Ever since she moved to this new studio in 2021, she’s felt an impulse to physically enlarge the scale of her work. Previously, she and three of her peers, among them fellow Abu Dhabi-born artist Hashel Al Lamki, professionally shared a villa in which they each took one room as a studio. The downtown space, known as Bait 15 (bait meaning home in Arabic), was once the home of the late Emirati actor Mohammed Al Janahi before he died in 2008 and it passed down to his son, the filmmaker Nawaf Al Janahi, who then leased it to the legendary Emirati painter Mohamed Al Mazrouei. When Bait 15 launched in 2018, the collective was revolutionary. But its members, buoyed by international interest, soon began outgrowing it, both figuratively and literally.
“We felt it was time to move on to the next step, setting up independent studios and setting a model for other artists to show them what’s possible,” says Al Dhaheri. “When I moved [to Mussafah], I started working on pieces that were larger than the scale of the studio before.”
The pace of her growth reflects that of Abu Dhabi itself. When Al Dhaheri first started practicing over a decade ago, the arts scene was nothing like it is today. Back then, the UAE’s capital was quieter than its neighboring emirate of Dubai, where the sprawling global art fair Art Dubai has been running since 2007. While Abu Dhabi has its own event, Abu Dhabi Art, this began as a much more subtle affair, taking place within the confines of the, albeit opulent, Emirates Palace hotel (it made headlines in 2010 for installing the world’s first gold-vending machine), and initially operating under the name Art Paris Abu Dhabi.
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ast-forward to 2025, and art is everywhere in the city, thanks to government funding that has allowed for the establishment of residencies and grants at institutions such as the Cultural Foundation or 421 Arts Campus. Galleries are popping up all over, from the burgeoning creative neighborhood of MiZa to Saadiyat Island, where a multiyear megaproject to create the emirate’s cultural district nears completion. Soon enough, the Louvre Abu Dhabi will be joined by the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and the Zayed National Museum, the latter of which is scheduled to open in December.
Under the latticed, Jean Nouvel-designed dome of the Louvre Abu Dhabi is where you’ll find the fifth edition of “Art Here.” The exhibition, opening on October 11, is part of the annual Richard Mille Art Prize, born in 2021 with one simple aim: to allow artistic talent from the Emirates to grow. Since then, the initiative has expanded to encompass applicants from across the Middle East and North Africa and, for the first time this year, Japan. But it’s about more than just a cash prize and exposure, says Museum Director Manuel Rabaté. “As the UAE art scene becomes more internationally visible, these artists are not just participating; they are actively shaping the discourse.”
Abu Dhabi-raised artist Rand Abdul Jabbar won the $60,000 grand prize in 2022 for her work, “Earthly Wonders, Celestial Beings” (2019-ongoing): a collection of glazed stoneware that interrogates the fragility of tangible heritage, drawing on Mesopotamian artifacts, architecture and mythology. Abdul Jabbar, who was born in Baghdad in 1990, says, “It acknowledged a body of work that I see as the foundations of my practice, so it gave me this sense of assuredness.”
As this creative landscape continues to expand, so do the artists who inhabit it, filling their studios, their canvases and the cultural space around them with a dynamism that resonates across borders.
This momentum has resulted in an increasingly self-confident generation of up-and-coming artists, both Emirati and international, who know they can learn, hone their craft and, like Al Dhaheri, lay down roots. “It’s a fast-evolving art scene and... it’s competing with the rest of the world,” she says. “When the Guggenheim opens, that’s going to be a real game changer.”
Dyala Nusseibeh, director of Abu Dhabi Art, agrees, pointing to the pool of talent emerging in a city where becoming an artist is a viable career choice. “There are multiple artist residences, degrees at universities, amazing museums, a multitude of galleries,” she explains. “There’s every opportunity as a young artist to develop and progress, and it’s not a saturated market.” If you’ve got something to say, there’s still plenty of space to say it.
A mong them is Simrin Mehra-Agarwal, an Indian-born multidisciplinary artist who has been practicing in the emirate for the past decade. She was also a finalist for the Richard Mille Art Prize the same year Abdul Jabbar won. Mehra-Agarwal incorporates her passion for scuba diving into her work, documenting sunken ships that were once vehicles for violence and war, but are now organic sources of life for the region’s depleting coral reefs. From here, she creates monumental installations that combine drawing, painting, relief sculpture, collage and assemblage. “There’s this intense repetition in [her work] that feels almost ritualistic,” Nusseibeh remarks. “It’s like she’s drawing and building at the same time.”
Mehra-Agarwal, who’s in her mid-40s, describes her penchant for repetition as a meditative practice that calls for the continuous engagement of her body. While she was classically trained in fine art, studying in Delhi, London and Florence, physicality now dominates her process, as the sheer scale of her pieces requires her to constantly move or be on her feet.
For this, she needs space. Space to breathe, to expand. Over the past 10 years, she’s had four studios in Abu Dhabi, including in the cultural hub of Manarat Al Saadiyat, where every year Nusseibeh’s art fair takes over its 15,000 square meters. Currently, Mehra-Agarwal is based in Khalifa City, where she moved six months ago. “I was really craving height [and] the ceilings here are at least double what I had before,” she says. “It’s changed how I work, how I move around the pieces. There’s something about being able to step back and really see the work from a distance, or look up and see it hanging.” That shift in perspective, she continues, is everything.
Mehra-Agarwal attributes the evolution of her practice not only to the generous dimensions of her studio, but to the wider environment of the UAE. Firstly, there is the proximity to the ocean and having access to several regional dive sites. Nature’s subtle influence in the detail of her pieces, particularly that of the desert, also seeps in, as does the vastness and palette of its beige-hued backdrop.
A bu dhabi’s landscape is more explicitly apparent in the work of Emirati multimedia artist Hashel Al Lamki, who draws inspiration from his background and from his topographical surroundings. Born in 1986 and raised outside the capital on Jebel Hafeet—the highest peak in Abu Dhabi—he produces sculptural works and sizable installations using resources from the land locally,such as natural pigments. These creations are often accompanied by audio and visual digital compilations, autobiographical elements and calculations of his carbon footprint.
“I look at the mountain as a container for different socioeconomic issues that we’re facing—the rapid growth that is happening across the region,” Al Lamki explains. Given that public perception of the UAE is often based upon images of glitz and grandeur, while the wider Middle East is associated with perpetual conflict and unrest, Al Lamki has made it his mission to show another side of where he’s from. “It’s about time to try and challenge those [preconceived notions] or introduce new topics that are more relevant to everyday life here.”
For Abdul Jabbar, too, her discipline is similarly steeped in memory of a place, for both her “Earthly Wonders, Celestial Beings” series and beyond. Using clay sculpture, writing, video and installation as her primary mediums, her practice demonstrates how the past intersects with her personal experience. “A lot of my work stems from this feeling of not really being from here nor there—trying to make sense of your place in the world,” she says. “When there are no tangible roots or anchors, you kind of have to invent them.” It helps that her current studio is in her own home, which itself is in the same neighborhood where she played as a child.
After returning from a residency in Mexico where she was documenting bricklayers in their studios—and adopting the same molds employed in their workshops—Abdul Jabbar is focused on a series of large drawings reimagining the primordial flood myth and, separately, her studied interest in a style of ceramic overglazing called “luster,” thought to have been invented in ninth-century Iraq under the Abbasid caliphate. This ancient method shifted and transformed as it traveled through Egypt, Iran, Syria and Spain, where she learned more about it from an artisan whose family has been using it for generations.
For the time being, the artist is comfortable operating out of her home studio, though she does hope to move to a bigger space that can accommodate a kiln. Of her current setup, she says: “The work I do is very personal. Dealing with memory and family history and archives, to be surrounded by all my objects and heirlooms has been quite special.”
I f there were one unifying theme that ties all these artists together, it’s the powerful impact their environment, and Abu Dhabi in particular, has had on them and their oeuvres. “It’s hard to really define trends, because the wonderful thing about this place is there are all these different people from different parts of the world,” Abdul Jabbar shares.
Nusseibeh believes this “melting pot,” and the shared experience of living in the UAE, is what makes the local art scene so dynamic. The undeniable mark Abu Dhabi is making on the wider art world as a result, she adds, is no accident. “It’s come out of a generation of museum planning and building up of opportunity. Now there’s so much more there for the young generation and they’re picking it up and taking it.”
The scale of ambition is exciting, says Rabaté, who is preparing for this year’s exhibition of prize-shortlisted artists. He describes this moment as the beginning of a long-term cultural legacy: “Exhibiting contemporary works next to millennia-old masterpieces is radical. It’s also deeply hopeful. We are building a future where the Gulf contributes meaningfully to the global artistic narrative, not as a satellite, but as a center.”