Displaying items by tag: Art Dubai

Art Dubai announced today that next year’s edition will take place from March 18 to 21. The fair’s dates will be particularly convenient for crowded art world calendars, as it will coincide with both the Sharjah Biennial and Design Days Dubai. The biennial in Sharjah, fifteen minutes away from Dubai by car, has become one of the foremost events at which to see art specifically from the Gulf regions.

For the ninth edition, Art Dubai’s extensive program of artists’ projects, including a live radio station and cinema, will continue. This includes the five-day Global Art Forum, which will feature 40 speakers; an exhibition of work by winners of the Abraaj Group Art Prize; and Campus Art Dubai, a year-round art school for artists and curators based in the UAE.

Prince Harry may have cancelled his polo trip to Dubai this month in deference to the political turmoil in the Middle East, but at least 80 galleries from Los Angeles to Beijing are going to Art Dubai, the Gulf’s biggest and longest-running international contemporary art fair, which opens on March 16. Although there has been a revolution in Egypt, a civil war looms in Libya, protesters have been on the streets of Bahrain, and tanks are out in neighbouring Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates are like a sea of tranquillity amid all the unrest.

The reason is, basically, money. The local Emiratis are better off, better looked after, and constitute only a fraction of the entire population anyway, the rest being expatriates. “It’s a different situation there – I don’t foresee any problems,” says Conor Macklin of London’s Grosvenor Vadhera Gallery, who is taking a roster of works by Indian and Pakistani artists to woo the core of wealthy Indian art buyers who live there.