Abwab; an annually remodeled exhibition dedicated to commissioning work from across the region, uniquely experienced at Dubai Design Week.
The Abwab exhibition is transformed annually to respond to the changing design climate of the region. The inaugural Dubai Design Week launched the first edition of Abwab in 2015 whereby six design teams drawn from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia were commissioned to produce design experiences incorporating one unifying theme - Games; The Element of Play in Culture. The country-specific pavilions hosting each exhibit were designed by UAE-based architects Loci Architecture & Design. Embodying the Emirati desert in their shells,, the 2015 Abwab pavilions were nominated by the Middle East Architecture Award.
The content was devised to be interactive, to engage audiences through personalizing cultural exchange. Jordan’s stone swings ‘the untitled swing project’ by Arini quickly became an attraction to visitors of Dubai Design District (d3) having remained in d3 until May of last year. Curators of Saudi Arabia, Basma & Noura Bouzo, Tunisia, Chacha Atallah and Pakistan, Salman Jawed were all subsequently selected to curate their respective country exhibitions in the London Design Biennial 2016, and curators of the UAE Pavilion, Mobius Design Studio are regularly curating exhibitions across the UAE.
A Hypothetical Office assembled the Abwab pavilions into a cluster in 2016, they covered the central space in a rich green netting and borrowed crumb-rubber floor tiles from waste management company Bee’ah to form a housh, courtyard, where visitors could gather after experiencing the six surrounding exhibits. Themed 'The Human Senses'’, the Algerian design team led by Hellal Zoubir produced a percussion landscape. The scent of the part craftsman/part machine, olive-wood arch by Elias & Yousef Anastas triggered nostalgia in the Palestinian Pavilion. Thukral and Tagra measured Dubai’s emotions through pigmented tiles containing memories now permanently installed in building 7, of d3. The Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities devised an app for empowering local pottery craftsmen with 'Unearthing', Rand Abdul Jabbar and Hozan Zangana produced an Iraqi sculpture garden of symbolic references of their country, and finallyAfaaq al Mustaqbal by UAE’s Salem al Qassemi created a reinterpreted Emirati cafeteria of the future.
In 2017, Abwab cast its widest net through an innovative peer-selection process, ‘design dominoes’; whereby in order to be considered to showcase a work, each designer is required to nominate the next designer to submit, a pay-it-forward mechanism. Through this, Abwab tasked itself with building a design community across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. 250 designers were reached, 101 submissions were shortlisted into 45 works from 15 countries all showcased in a bulbous pavilion by Fahed + Architects. The fourth edition will be announced soon.