Highlights from Art Dubai and UAE Biennials

A Peruvian conceptual artist investigating the influence of and resistance to colonialism and the erasure of cultural traditions, Ximena Garrido-Lecca was educated in Lima before journeying at age 20 to London, where she received an MA in Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins in 2004. She returned to Lima in 2012 to explore the relationship between Peru’s indigenous culture and the globalization transforming her homeland.

A prime example of this work is her series of Heliomorphism sculptures, created through a technique developed by the artist using silicon sourced from solar panels. These objects are inspired by vessels discovered at the Temple of the Sun, a revered Peruvian archaeological site. Recycling solar panels that convert sunlight into energy, the Mexico City-based artist uses the silicon to create an offering to the sun and the Andean world.

Image: Ximena Garrido-Lecca, Heliomorphisms, 2021. Installation view: Sharjah Biennial 16, Al Dhaid Clinic, Al Dhaid, 2025.

A pioneer of contemporary art in the Gulf Region, Hassan Sharif was arguably the most important artist working in the United Arab Emirates when he died in 2016. Having graduated in 1984 from London’s Byam Shaw School of Art, he was aware of the British Constructionist, Fluxus, Nouveau Realist, and Conceptual Art movements, which inspired the process-oriented art made from everyday objects that defined his practice. 

With a solo show of mixed media sculptures on view at Gallery Isabelle in Dubai, Galleria Franco Noero’s presentation of his 2015 assemblage Cardboard was perfectly timed. Constructed from repurposed cardboard boxes, fabric, and cotton thread readily found in the local souks, Sharif transformed the repetition of materials and actions into a work of art through a thoughtful process of play.

Image: Hassan Sharif, Cardboard, 2015. Cardboard, cotton thread, and cloth. 84 x 62 x 10 cm.

A Cairo-born artist educated in Montreal and Paris, Chant Avedissian celebrated popular culture and politics in Egypt through his inventive use of imagery stenciled over hand-painted backgrounds colored with local pigments. The Icons of the Nile series features portraits of famous 20th century singers, movie stars, and socialist leaders drawn from advertising, state propaganda, and popular magazine imagery. 

Superimposed over traditional patterns and symbols appropriated from Ancient Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, and Silk Route iconography, and hand-stenciled with gouache and cardboard, the paintings deconstruct and reassemble the mediated sources in a folksy, Pop Art style. The painting Lekaa, whose title translates from Arabic to English as Meeting, captures two famous singers reuniting after years of rivalrous feuding.

Image: Chant Avedissian, Lekaa - Icons of the Nile 122, 1990-1993. Gouache on corrugated cardboard, 52.5 × 72.5 cm.

An Iraqi refugee who fled her homeland with her family during the first Gulf War, Hayv Kahraman grew up in Sweden and studied art in Italy before settling in the United States. Referencing her wartime trauma and status as an immigrant who could never fully belong to a homogeneous society, Kahraman uses the female figure as a metaphor for expressing her pain. Employing elements of calligraphy, Italian Renaissance painting, Japanese printmaking, and illuminated Arab manuscripts, she paints exotic women who are both submissive and fierce. The 2023 painting Look Me in the Eyes No. 9, part of the Los Angeles-based artist’s recent solo at ICA San Francisco and Seattle’s Frye Art Museum, draws upon her longstanding motif of heavily browed, lidded eyes to expose the simultaneous surveillance and erasure of marginalized bodies.

Image: Hayv Kahraman, Look Me in the Eyes No. 9, 2023. Oil and acrylic on linen, 93.98 x 93.98 cm.

A business school graduate with a hidden interest in drawing, architecture, and urban environments, Ghizlane Agzenaï was inspired by Mexico City’s public murals and thriving graffiti art scene to start painting geometric abstraction on city streets worldwide. The self-taught Moroccan artist soon expanded her practice to works on paper, canvas, and sculptural forms with motives inspired by art history and popular culture, ranging from her fascination with the abstract art of Bridget Riley, Frank Stella, and Victor Vasarely to her observations of architectural ornamentation and textile designs in real life. 

At the fair, Agzenaï showcased a sold-out collection of totem paintings, including the playfully-shaped Totem Amsonia, which features the signature psychedelic colors, Day-Glo hues, and voluminous forms that the talented artist enjoys expressing and sharing.

Image: Ghizlane Agzenaï, Totem Amsonia 2025. Acrylic on canvas, 150 x 200 cm.

Creating art under an adopted name that translates from his Southern Indian language as "method of hand,” Kaimurai primarily uses two significant Indian materials to make his work: indigo and khadi. Brushing indigo (a blue pigment extracted from the indigo plant) onto khadi (a hand-spun and woven natural fiber textile usually made from cotton) while listening to Carnatic music (the classical sound of South India, characterized by its melodic modes, rhythmic cycles, and vocal emphasis), the Bangalore-based artist produces sublimely meditative artworks.

Viewing his art-making as a form of prayer, he allows his hands to guide him while making repeated marks—a method that creates spiritual artworks like Reflection and Energy (An II), an abstract painting that captures the trancelike state Kaimurai enters to reflect the vibrations he feels from everything around him. 

Image: Kaimurai, Reflection and Energy (An II), 2025. Natural Indigo on unbleached Khadi textile,  90 1/2 x 59 in (230 x 150 cm).

BREAKFAST is an artist specializing in data and kinetics, focusing on converting real-time natural data into digitally driven kinetic artworks that narrate stories. Creating engaging works that provide visual pleasure while provoking thought, such as Lisbon Warming Seas and Brisbane Warming Seas, on view in the booth, utilize live ocean temperature data to interact with passing individuals through live camera action and kinetic flip discs.

Commissioned to create his 23-foot-wide Carbon Wake, an interactive sculpture that employs real-time energy data to interpret carbon fluctuations in 100+ global cities, the Brooklyn-based artist also exhibited editioned pieces like Portraits in Black and Gold, which spellbindingly capture each collector’s interactions with the flip-disc screen and then cycle back through them at their desired intervals.

Image: BREAKFAST, Portraits in Black and Gold, 2025. Ink & foil on flip-discs, software, camera, computer, 38 x 38 in | 96 x 96 cm. Edition of 5. 

A celebrated Emirati contemporary artist and visiting assistant professor at NYU Abu Dhabi, Shaikha Al Mazrou's practice is anchored in art history, borrowing formally from minimalism and intellectually from conceptual art. Her sculptural explorations and studies express materiality, illustrating the tension and the interaction between form and content. 

During Art Dubai, her installation Deliberate Pauses, the largest site-specific art intervention in Dubai which consists of five reflective red metallic sculptures commissioned by Alserkal Arts Foundation, was unveiled in a mountainous landscape along scenic hiking trails. Meanwhile, at the gallery’s fair booth, she exhibited one of her signature monochromatic sculptural paintings, Untitled, a dynamically puffed red, 2025 wet-coated steel piece that began as abstract origami she originally made with paper.

Image: Shaikha Al Mazrou, Untitled, 2025. Wet coated steel, 120 x 105 x 20 cm, 47 1/4 x 41 3/8 x 7 7/8 in.

Featured in the group exhibition Now Is Not the Time for Pretty Pictures, curated by Emirati artist Rami Farook for ATHR at the fair, the 2022 painting 12 Lone Wolves/Circuits—Farook’s collaborative oil on canvas work with Washington DC-born, Bahrain-based Saudi artist Lulua Alyahya—stood out as a remarkable artwork. Mixed into a collection of artworks by ATHR-represented artists Mohammad AlFaraj, Eissa Attar, and Muhannad Shono that confront the harsh realities of our time, the exhibition conceptually reframed ugliness as a tool for emotional resonance. 

Created when the self-taught Farook and Alyahya, who received an MFA from Goldsmiths, were artists-in-residence in London, the painting combines a pack of wolves with Arabic symbols and observing eyes in a lively, surreal realm.

Image: Rami Farook & Lulua Alyahya, 12 Lone Wolves/Circuits, 2022. Oil on Canvas, 100 x 127 cm. 

A multi-disciplinary Emirati visual artist whose practice spans photography, drawing, and installation art, Shaikha Al Ketbi added sculpture to the list with her Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial artworks on view in a park in Al Ain, an inland oasis city on the eastern border with Oman and the place where the artist grew up. 

Blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, the artist created a surreal series of lampposts that transformed the existing ones in the city’s Hili Archeological Park into childhood memories of playing there. Her spirited sculpture, Imagine it's foggy,  depicts a larger-than-life ostrich that has collided with one of the lampposts in a fog, with the poor creature playfully caught by the twisted stem of the night light around its long neck.

Image: Shaikha Al Ketbi, Imagine it's foggy, Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial 2024 – 2025

An Abu Dhabi-based American artist working in socially engaged art and installation, Christopher Joshua Benton has collaborated with academics, architects, scientists, and everyday people to imagine new ways of living and to create new sites of knowledge production. For Where Lies My Carpet Is Thy Home, his expansive installation project for the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial, Benton collaborated with carpet merchants from Abu Dhabi’s carpet souk to create a giant Astroturf carpet that covers a sandlot in the center of the market. 

The design, evoking a pixelated 8-bit aesthetic akin to early video games, captures the lifecycle of a carpet—from gathering sheep’s wool and dyeing fibers with natural indigo to selling it in the souk—with memories of the merchants’ homelands woven together with their present lives at the souk and their dreams of return. 

Image: Christopher Joshua Benton, Where Lies My Carpet Is Thy Home, Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial 2024 – 2025