The U.A.E., alongside the MENA area at giant, is making clear that artwork and tradition sit on the heart of its nationwide agenda and future identification. The proof is in every single place: the rising constellation of museums on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island, the surge of latest galleries opening throughout Dubai and now Frieze’s takeover of the historic Abu Dhabi Artwork honest starting subsequent yr after this profitable and already extra worldwide seventeenth version, an announcement that arrived solely months earlier than the launch of the primary version of Artwork Basel Qatar in February.
Opening together with the seventeenth version of Abu Dhabi Artwork and following the success of its 2023 inaugural debut, Manar Abu Dhabi transforms and prompts a few of the most fascinating public, historic and pure websites within the metropolis’s panorama, with twenty-two site-specific works unfolding throughout Abu Dhabi’s mangroves, sandbanks and concrete edges. Conceived underneath the umbrella of Public Artwork Abu Dhabi, in its second version and now formally working as an open-air biennial, Manar had its first creative director this yr. Internationally famend curator Khai Hori (additionally former deputy director of creative programming at Palais de Tokyo in Paris) helped form its curatorial idea and its particular relationship with the context wherein it takes place, working alongside co-curators Alia Zaal Lootah and Munira Al Sayegh with assistant curator Mariam Alshehhi. Titled “The Gentle Compass,” the open-air exhibition explores the Gulf’s ancestral relationship with gentle not solely as an inventive medium but in addition as an lively and mnemonic vessel—a tool of orientation and reorientation prior to now as a lot as an emotional and empathic one within the current.
Whereas the notion of a community-oriented “gentle artwork pageant” may make a lot of the artwork world assume this may translate into the standard immersive digital spectacle designed for households, an leisure format that usually collapses aesthetics and sensation into Instagram-ready consumption, Manar—like Noor Riyadh (opening in the identical days) and different biennials and artwork festivals rising within the area centered on time- and technology-based media and public artwork—accommodates much more depth, conceptual grounding and a severe site-specific curatorial intent.
Manar Abu Dhabi was born from a elementary query: What defines Abu Dhabi and its magnificence? A part of the reply lies in its pure environment. “Abu Dhabi is an archipelago of small islands, surrounded by extraordinary mangroves. We wished to focus on these pure reserves via public artwork,” Reem Fadda, director of the Cultural Basis and Abu Dhabi Cultural Programmes, who curated the inaugural version, instructed Observer forward of our go to. “We created Manar—that means ‘lighthouse’—to shine a lightweight on these shorelines and landscapes. Water, gentle, nature and artwork turned its core system.”
Each within the inaugural and this yr’s version, works on view had been commissioned from internationally recognized artists energetic throughout digital and institutional contexts in addition to artists within the area who’ve already developed a artistic language rooted within the intersection of artwork and new applied sciences. Lots of them have grown up watching their nation endure accelerated modernization, which has magnified the space between custom and the longer term, however they typically discovered within the new applied sciences the means and instruments to reconnect with almost misplaced ancestral practices via the fluidity of time, area and contemplation allowed by media and time-based works.
Ultimately, gentle is the place the whole lot begins. Actuality, as a phenomenon, solely exists for our eyes via it. Manar pushes the thought of sunshine additional. Right here, gentle unveils the thread and the supply that also connects the current to the previous and to our potential futures, working all through and permitting a number of types of creative and artistic expression to manifest, from the spark of instinct rising from darkness to an thought written on paper illuminated first by a torch then by an LED bulb, to the electrical energy that prompts pixels into photos and that means, and even earlier to the hearth round which primordial storytelling first took form.
Additional emphasizing its function as an lively channel between previous, current and future within the nation’s cultural formation, the biennial extends past town’s central districts for the primary time, partaking websites that reveal a extra various identification. New installations work together with historic historical past in Al Ain, a desert oasis and UNESCO World Heritage web site, and develop into new places throughout Abu Dhabi, together with Jubail Mangrove Park, underscoring the pageant’s ambition to broaden its cultural attain all through the area.
Khai Hori acknowledged that enlargement introduced challenges. All works needed to adjust to strict heritage and environmental protocols now in place, requiring dialogue with archaeologists and biologists to safeguard each the previous and way forward for this land, which reveals itself underneath Manar’s gentle to be terribly wealthy culturally and naturally, far past the shiny futuristic skyline of luxurious condos and hospitality-driven improvement. However these constraints seem to have strengthened the exhibition, prompting curators and artists, each native and worldwide, to have interaction deeply with consultants and achieve a extra genuine understanding of the cultural, historic and ecological contexts wherein their works would take form.
The result’s a constellation of technology- and light-based multimedia works that, even when put in in historic websites or protected pure areas, combine with an virtually seamless, symbiotic grace. Our journey started within the historic metropolis of Al Ain, the place one of many first artworks encountered was Khalid Shafar’s Sadu Crimson Carpet. A thread of purple gentle is woven right into a carpet, guiding guests via the stays of a 400-year-old fort. Drawing inspiration from Emirati Sadu weaving, a craft acknowledged by UNESCO and historically used for blankets and tents, Shafar transforms its black-and-white alternation right into a glowing purple gentle emanating from the ground, increasing into the physique and past into the panorama. It envelops its environment with a shared glow and energetic aura whereas returning the normal motif as a digital-seeming pixel subject. The carpet turns into a mosaic that reads like each sample and code.
The intervention required substantial manufacturing work, changing ground tiles with LED modules whereas navigating heritage laws. The end result weaves previous and current right into a single thread of continuity whereas resonating particularly with youthful audiences via its digitally inflected pixel-like aesthetic. As its caption reads, “Heritage shouldn’t be displayed at a distance. It’s walked and felt underfoot.”
Different installations in Al Ain invite guests to reattune to the rhythms of nature. Amongst them is “Breath of the Identical Place” by Maitha Hamdan, an Emirati artist born in Al Ain, which makes the set up a poignant homecoming and an intimate reconnection along with her land. Wrapped round historic six-meter-high timber, essentially the most resilient species within the desert, the work makes tangible the energies they maintain, channeling a primordial continuity. The twinkling lights kind a lyrical choreography with sound, grounding viewers in earthly sensation whereas lifting them right into a realm of legendary reminiscence. Right here, gentle guides a measured encounter with each our human and planetary pasts.
This attunement and reconnection with nature can be evident in Christian Brinkman’s Floral Resonance 2025, an interactive audiovisual set up that renders plant–human relations tangible via a VR-driven rendering system aware of plant motion. The pictures come up from an invisible magnetic subject of interplay that predates language and operates on a primordial energetic stage. Whereas technologically modest in comparison with what A.I. may now assist obtain, the work poignantly highlights the important and infrequently missed interdependencies that bind us inside a broader multispecies ecosystem.
As a grand finale in Al Ain, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s mesmerizing gentle set up Pulse Cover gathers quiet vitality from guests, translating every heartbeat into rays of sunshine that kind shifting shapes and momentary shelters within the sky. A hand on the sensor renders the physique all of the sudden seen, ten beams rising and falling in rhythm, turning the cover at Al Qattara right into a shared respiration ceiling the place time dilates and the area responds in paced illumination. Close by, his Translation Stream carries up to date poems by Nujoom Alghanem, Khalid Albudoor and Adel Khozam as a mushy present throughout the courtyard ground, its drifting letters shifting between Arabic and English as sensors register every step. Language seems earlier than that means, a shared symbolic code gathering viewers into momentary relation because the projected circulation responds to motion, breeze and night time.
A equally charming demonstration of sunshine’s energy to create regenerative rituals of neighborhood and creativeness unfolds on Jubail Island, considered one of greater than 200 islands in Abu Dhabi’s archipelago. Set between Saadiyat and Yas and anchored by dense mangrove habitat, the island additionally accommodates two pre-Islamic archaeological websites that talk to a far older human presence, and this yr turns into the primary web site for Manar.
This extra context doesn’t seem in official narratives, but talking with the curators reveals its significance. The location was largely empty aside from development equipment tied to ongoing improvement that can add residential neighborhoods, a mangrove eco-park and ADREA, the Abu Dhabi Equestrian Artwork College. Utilizing the island for Manar shouldn’t be solely a artistic intervention but in addition a pause within the relentless transformation, returning the land to neighborhood leisure use, if solely briefly. As night time falls, Studio DRIFT’s choreography of drones rises into the sky, floating and creating amphibious shapes that bridge the earth, sea and air.
Lachlan Turczan’s Gateway, a gate of mist and laser gentle, types a porous luminous portal into parallel dimensions—symbolic, imaginative, religious—that coexist with the sensory world revealed within the passing. Recognized for laser-based water tasks, Turczan works to make the invisible seen, coaxing latent forces into a short perceptible kind that sharpens each sensory and imaginative reception.
As a ritual of passage or initiation, Turczan’s Gateway leads into Studio DRIFT’s Whispers, the place gentle follows wind throughout a excessive round dune because the solar gently nourishes a subject of untamed weeds. The set up is designed to be skilled from a number of views—beside it, inside it and above it—as guests navigate shifting scales of land, nature, gentle and vitality. Throughout our go to, the wind was nonetheless, so the stems didn’t sway into illumination. But that absence emphasised the work’s elementary precept. When wind arrives, the drone constellations can not seem. The set up attunes itself to nature’s rhythm, embracing contingency as a part of its design.
One other DRIFT set up, Unfold, reveals our interior genetic and energetic ties to nature. Blooming flowers open into kaleidoscopic formations nurtured by guests’ biometric information. Capturing every heartbeat in actual time, an algorithm generates visuals impressed by native flora, continuously shifting but unexpectedly natural regardless of the hyper-technological framework.
Persevering with onward, Ezequiel Pini’s Skyward in the course of the desert opens one other immersive portal into different spatial and temporal realms, a up to date altar that invitations reconnection with the cosmos and its forces. Put in among the many mangroves, its tilted mirrored floor is anchored to the bottom by a single sculpted stone whereas reflecting each the panorama and the open sky. Animated constellations emerge as guests method, remodeling the sculpture right into a threshold between digital and bodily area, earth and celestial realms.
A brief stroll from it, Kristen Berg’s Compound Eye (2015) additional extends this dialogue between micro and macro. A mirrored sculpture first proven at Burning Man, it gathers and disperses gentle like a compact photo voltaic instrument, shifting from a reflective beacon by day to an illuminated subject by night time. Stand earlier than its lens-like spheres and your picture seems on the heart of every mirror. Transfer and your reflection dissolves into others, staging notion as an interaction between self and collective consciousness.
Nevertheless, it’s on the coronary heart of Jubail’s mangrove forest that Shaikha Al Mazrou’s intervention yields one of many island’s most placing land-and-light works. Working with pure compounds derived from algae, with out chemical substances or synthetic supplies, she transforms an orange-lit tidal pool right into a primordial basin, evoking the earliest origins of life. The Contingent Object is a research in fragility and transformation, a thirty-meter salt circle that begins as nonetheless water earlier than deepening in shade and crystallizing via the consequences of warmth, wind and evaporation. What’s fluid turns into stable; what’s invisible turns into luminous.
With an analogous message, Pamela Tan’s Eden (2025) invitations guests right into a skeletal backyard the place micro and macro worlds intersect. Impressed by the generative concord of the legendary Eden, she constructs a respiration ecosystem of articulated metal buildings and glass spheres that collect and refract gentle. Painted in white, ghostly but celestial, the set up remembers nineteenth-century glasshouses and faint reminiscences of Paxton’s Crystal Palace, reimagined as a up to date subject the place nature is framed relatively than changed.
Towards the exit, a capsule of sunshine, sound and suspended notion rises like an energetically and spiritually charged echo chamber. Encor Studio’s Alcove Ltd makes use of violently pulsing electrical gentle as each medium and metaphor. Rhythm, reflection and refraction unfold like an elemental pulse. Put in inside a six-meter recycled delivery container, its liquid-crystal laminated partitions remodel the construction right into a mutable gentle field, suspending viewers between readability and opacity, illumination and shadow. As guests method the glowing container, sensors translate motion into sequences that multiply and dissolve throughout mirrored surfaces till the picture and surroundings loop into each other. But every viewer stays exterior the capsule, out of the phenomenon, at the same time as they activate it as a choreography oscillating between isolation and emergence, look and disappearance, spectatorship and company.
On this sense, Alcove Ltd finally ends up exemplifying the deeper operate of many Manar installations, turning into a charged station for creativeness, the place notion folds into sensation and the unexplainable magic of phenomena briefly takes kind. On this suspended zone, future potentialities take form, and light-weight illuminates limitless various eventualities to the current expertise.
Like Manar as a complete, the set up operates each symbolically and experientially, reminding us not solely of sunshine’s energy but in addition of darkness because the generative subject the place vitality gathers and transforms. By creating these symbolic websites of sunshine, artwork and nature, Manar gestures towards the renewed capability of latest communities to assemble in shared ritual, discovering moments of contemplation and quiet collective spirituality that restore a way of belonging to a cyclical order of energies and forces extra intensive than our personal lives.
The function of public artwork within the metropolis’s future
Timed to coincide with the perfect season of the yr, Manar serves as each an open-air exhibition and a citywide cultural encounter, bringing worth to the various communities residing within the metropolis, the Emirates and the broader area effectively earlier than aiming to develop into merely an attraction for the worldwide artwork world or a future engine of tourism.
Though the pageant had solely simply opened after we visited, every web site was already stuffed with households and younger {couples}, suggesting that the initiative is rapidly turning into a part of town’s life and an early supply of artistic inspiration for its future.
This, nonetheless, shouldn’t be new for Abu Dhabi or the U.A.E. The town has lengthy invested in public artwork, as Fadda defined. “The town has approached it via numerous iterations, methods and authorities entities, and public artwork monuments right here date again to the Seventies,” she famous. “We even have fashionable heritage public artworks which were formally registered, so there’s a deep historical past in Abu Dhabi of each public artwork and the care that surrounds it.”
Fadda has performed a number one function in shaping the emirate’s public-art technique each as co-curator of the earlier Manar version and as creative director of Public Artwork Abu Dhabi (PAAD). Round 2019-21, she stated, renewed discussions started about the best way to rethink and develop public artwork amid main museum and institutional investments. The important thing query turned the best way to have interaction native audiences extra instantly and produce public artwork into up to date civic discourse relatively than counting on the normal representational operate of monuments. In brief: How can we take public artwork into the streets in a visual, intentional manner?
This prompted the workforce to develop a method rooted in Abu Dhabi’s particular situations. “We’ve got six months of utmost warmth and harsh climate, which naturally limits out of doors audiences, and a few supplies merely don’t maintain up,” she stated. “So we requested what mannequin may really work right here—one thing event-based, rooted in neighborhood engagement and significant by itself phrases.”
From these priorities emerged an annual program centered on two alternating flagship occasions, every emphasizing public relevance and significance. Alongside Manar is the Public Artwork Abu Dhabi Biennial, launched final yr. In each occasions, most works are newly commissioned for Abu Dhabi, embedded in its material and talking on to town and its inhabitants. “They’re very a lot site-specific—or, maybe extra precisely ‘city-specific,’” Fadda added. Even when a pre-existing work appears applicable, it’s typically tailored in dialogue with the place.
Public Artwork Abu Dhabi Biennial types the second pillar of this system, one of many Division of Tradition and Tourism – Abu Dhabi’s (DCT Abu Dhabi) main long-term initiatives. Its inaugural version, titled “Public Matter,” ran final yr from November 2024 via April 30 2025, exploring what public issues in Abu Dhabi’s distinctive context of city area, surroundings, neighborhood and heritage. “This one is extra inward-facing,” Fadda defined, targeted on everlasting infrastructure, sturdy supplies and community-rooted commissions that develop into long-term fixtures. “These works are supposed to populate completely different areas of Abu Dhabi and construct a legacy of everlasting public artwork.”
Members included Emirati and worldwide artists: Allora & Calzadilla, Farah Al Qasimi, Kader Attia, Christopher Joshua Benton, guBuyoBand, Hashel Al Lamki, Kabir Mohanty, Khalil Rabah, Oscar Murillo, Radhika Khimji, Sammy Baloji, Tarik Kiswanson, Wael Al Awar, Zeinab Alhashemi and others.
In Manar, as within the Public Artwork Abu Dhabi Biennial, site-specificity is important. One emblematic challenge Fadda highlights is Christopher Joshua Benton’s intervention within the automobile park of Souq Al Mina. “There’s a lovely historic Afghan carpet market there, constructed within the Nineteen Sixties by Sheikh Zayed as a present to the Afghan carpet sellers—a real dwelling away from dwelling for that neighborhood,” she stated. Working intently with Afghan, Iranian and Pakistani distributors, Benton created a monumental astroturf carpet that honors their information, tradition and diasporic histories. The work will stay on web site for 3 years as a residing monument to that neighborhood.
Past these occasions, Public Artwork Abu Dhabi has established a complete commissioning program and grasp plan for the whole emirate. Manar Abu Dhabi, for example, additionally options an energetic public program that integrates artwork, know-how and neighborhood via talks, lectures and workshops developed in partnership with organizations equivalent to Fujifilm, The Knot and Gracia Farms. This system additionally consists of performances, amongst them Bedouin Burger, Haepaary and Ars Nova Napoli, and wellness and nature-focused actions equivalent to guided meditations, nature walks and sustainability initiatives led by the Setting and Nature Division of Abu Dhabi’s Mangrove Initiative. In collaboration with WE ARE ONA and Luca Pronzato, WE ARE ONA x Manar Abu Dhabi presents an immersive eating expertise by visitor chef Solemann Haddad.
“It’s a large-scale, long-term endeavor that we’re creating steadily,” Fadda stated. “However on the coronary heart of it, the precedence has at all times been the neighborhood—making a shared language of engagement round artwork, setting the stage for the whole lot folks will quickly encounter in museums and cultural areas throughout town.” Thus far, the response has been extraordinary. “Every challenge has had exceptional attain—within the lots of of 1000’s, even tens of millions—particularly the general public artwork biennial.”
Most significantly, she stresses, all of those tasks are conceived as legacy initiatives, laying the foundations for long-term artwork manufacturing, public engagement and cultural reminiscence. “We’ll solely really perceive their impression 10 or 20 years from now, once they’ve set historic precedents and develop into proof of how artwork historical past is taking form,” she stated. “That’s what I’m desperate to witness. We already discover ourselves referencing the primary version’s Manar, and now we’re within the second—the buildup of those iterations is, actually, priceless for a metropolis.”
