By now, artwork lovers have grown accustomed to boutique gala’s staged in lodge suites, and with the U-Haul artwork truthful, we now have even seen galleries exhibiting inside vans and parking heaps. NOMAD, nonetheless, has pushed the experiment additional. For the primary time, an artwork and design truthful has landed inside an airport, taking up the decommissioned Terminal 1 of Zayed Worldwide Airport for its inaugural Abu Dhabi version. The environment was totally on theme and uncannily apt—nearly too acquainted for the globetrotting profile of a lot of the artwork world. Guests entered with boarding pass-style playing cards handed out at a check-in counter staffed by hostesses, earlier than navigating reactivated terminals and lounge-style eating areas, all produced in partnership with Etihad Airways.
Inside, fairgoers moved by a sequence of areas the place curated conversations between artwork and design unfolded. These opened into small alcoves, every with its personal narrative, materials experimentation and curatorial rhythm, constructing a cohesive sense of rigor that elevated the expertise.
Native and worldwide galleries used the airport’s unusual neutrality and its sense of suspended time and house to their benefit. Among the many first exhibitors guests encountered on the entrance was The Third Line, a number one UAE gallery presenting a sequence of extra accessible limited-edition prints by artists from the area. The gallery’s robust roster of internationally acknowledged artists tied to the area was positioned in dialogue with native designers and creators by The Third Line Store. In response to the gallery’s co-founder, Sunny Rahbar, the presentation engages with materiality, course of, geometric abstraction and cross-cultural alternate—from Ala Ebtekar’s celestial work to Kamran Samimi’s stone sculptures and vibrant prints by Amir H. Fallah. “The setting of the previous Abu Dhabi airport superbly amplifies these works,” he tells Observer.
One other native gallery, Leila Heller, offered pioneering artist-designer Dale Chihuly, whose glass environments have redefined the language of up to date studio glass. At NOMAD, his experimental strategy to Murano-blown glass materialized in voluminous, color-saturated types paying homage to flowers and marine corals. The mix of technical mastery, sculptural creativeness and an institutionally validated profession—his works already reside in main collections together with the Victoria and Albert Museum—explains the substantial pricing: particular person items supplied at $55,000-60,000 and bigger installations reaching $300,000.
As is common at NOMAD, many shows fluidly mixed artwork and collectible design in harmonies of narrative and kind. In Abu Dhabi, this was instantly evident within the three-way collaboration between Olivier Varenne Artwork Moderne et Contemporain from Geneva, Adam Knight Effective Artwork and Tasmanian-born designer Brodie Neill. Chiharu Shiota’s quiet, memorial poetry of supplies, traces and emotional threads was paired with the painterly, dotted cosmologies grounded within the earthy connection to land discovered within the work of Aboriginal artist Clifford Possum Tjapaltjiarri, each united by an angle towards supplies as vessels of reminiscence—a sensibility they share with Neill, identified for reworking reclaimed and waste supplies into refined sculptural but practical objects. Constructed from plastic waste recovered from the ocean and impressed by maritime maps, Neill’s Gyro desk—first proven on the London Design Biennale—charts a geometrical sample that echoes the terminal’s ceiling grid. Priced round $90,000-120,000, his creations echoed the identical preoccupation shared by the opposite two artists with materiality as a bodily and emotional report of human presence, company and duty on this planet—a degree the place human types and ecology meet.
Within the niches that when served as ready areas, a number of particular person creators, designers and artists launched extra intimate propositions that deepened the truthful’s reflection on the interconnection between materials, reminiscence and the psychology of transit, by objects conceived as each emotional and practical units.
One of the crucial strikingly authentic design lexicons on this version comes from Vagujheli by Diego Villarreal Vagujheli, a younger Spanish designer based mostly in New York who at NOMAD debuts his first assortment “POSTURA.” His organically patinated bronze objects carry traces of his work along with his mom in post-disaster reduction in Puerto Rico, evoking of their fluid, tactile shapes the malleability of mud—hovering between collapse, momentary infrastructures of care and the potential for reshaping. His emotionally and ergonomically attuned editioned objects, all priced below $25,000, really feel suspended between erosion and rebirth, balancing sculptural tactility with ergonomic logic and self-discipline. The primary design piece he ever created—an ergonomic weight perched on a sculptural base—grew to become a seed for a whole language, he explains. The item’s bodily traits encourage and direct a posture, a conduct and a exact interplay already embedded within the kind.
From the area, Egypt’s Don Tatani added a quietly compelling chapter with superbly produced Cairo-made design, whereas the younger U.A.E. collective Tremendous Loop confirmed Fluid Echoes, a sequence of fluidly and curvilinearly carved picket items—editioned however unrepeatable because of the grain and the hand, but nonetheless inside an accessible worth vary of $4,000-13,000.
On the Italian facet, Robilant+Voena paired Italian masters—together with a Pistoletto mirror and Boetti’s embroidered map—with Italian design in a presentation that landed with unmistakable confidence and class, embodying the “made in Italy” ethos. Additionally from Milan, Nilufar staged one of many truthful’s most scenographic interventions: flora-inspired Murano glass sculptural lamps by Christian Pellizzari illuminated the hall resulting in a chamber the place classic gems by Gio Ponti met cross-cultural and up to date design, together with creations by Etereo, Gal Galon, Shlomo Harush, Allegra Hicks, Maximilian Marchesani, Claude Missir, Odd Matter, Osanna Visconti, StudioDanielK and the nature-inspired work of Indian designer Vicram Goyal.
One other close by passage opened right into a red-draped house the place masterworks by Wayne Thiebaud, Lucio Fontana and Yoshitomo Nara hovered like apparitions in entrance of vitrines full of valuable gems and designer jewellery.
NOMAD additionally offered extra concept-based multidimensional interventions on the psychology of transit. Antidote’s In Transit, an immersive video set up, supplied an oasis of pause and meditative introspection. Glitching departure screens, terminal seating and journey paraphernalia looped as a mantra, making a quiet invitation to inside check-in. Commissioned by the spatial design studio creatorandcurator, the challenge aligns with Antidote’s broader wellness idea. A practical bar accompanied the presentation, serving wholesome power drinks constructed on adaptogens, nootropics and botanicals as an alcohol and sugar free bar for the airport and the artwork gala’s of the longer term.
Impressed by the rhythms of airports and the language of relentless motion shared with right this moment’s international artwork world jet set, the intervention reworked the terminal into an immersive bar-meets-art set up augmented with scientific components. Its menu included blends like Repair Me, Treatment Me, Calm Me and Enhance Me, every powered by botanicals, adaptogens and Cymbiotika-sourced dietary supplements to assist mind-body stability.
Additionally offered on the truthful was Formafantasma’s “Cohabitare,” developed with Perrier-Jouët, which prolonged the meditation on our entanglement with supplies and environments. The truthful largely leaned towards a brand new era of designers increasing the lexicon of kind, mixing performance, craftsmanship and narrative into items that learn as full-fledged artworks. Nonetheless, a couple of gems from the previous appeared as effectively, comparable to Oscar Niemeyer’s elegant chaise longue at We Gallery’s sales space, the place icons of Brazilian modernism met the nation’s most compelling up to date creators. Amongst them had been Lucas Recchia’s progressive materials experiments and Domingos Tótora’s tactile, earth-inspired sculptural items constituted of recycled cardboard pulp.
After 15 editions throughout Capri, St. Moritz, Monaco and Venice, NOMAD arrives in Abu Dhabi not as an import however as a resonance. The area’s cultural vocabulary is steeped in motion—nomadism, transit and thresholds—and the airport setting offers that heritage a literal structure. Established in 2017 by Canadian Italian architect Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte as a touring showcase for up to date artwork and collectible design, NOMAD has at all times thrived on combining radical dislocation with elegant curation, slipping collectible design into villas in Capri, palazzos in Venice and chalets in St. Moritz. With this Abu Dhabi iteration, the truthful launched its distinctive format and curatorial rigor to the Center East, discovering resonance in each its title and its website—nomadic motion, transience and the state of being in transit, all central to the area’s cultural cloth.
As Abu Dhabi Artwork transitions into Frieze Abu Dhabi subsequent 12 months, the boutique occasion will be the area’s sole truthful devoted to collectible design, bridging native craftsmanship with worldwide experience and offering an area for discovery, innovation and new relationships between kind, craft and performance. “What fascinates me about presenting NOMAD inside Terminal 1 is that the airport stops being a spot of transit and turns into, for a second, a vacation spot in itself,” Bellavance-Lecompte tells Observer, noting how guests are actually in a position to reappropriate a constructing, a kind of “non-place” architectures of transit, that many might need handed by for greater than 4 a long time but not often had the prospect to really see. “By filling this iconic modernist terminal with collectible design and artwork, your complete expertise shifts: folks look in another way on the structure, on the gentle, on the scale of the house. The truthful permits them to rediscover a well-known landmark with new eyes, reworking the act of ‘passing by’ into an act of contemplation.”
Extra in artwork gala’s, biennials and triennials
