What Happens When an Island, an Oasis, and an Old Airport Become Art Exhibitions?

The procession of buggies moves slowly, almost ceremonially, into the dark. Their headlights switch off just before the path dissolves into mangroves – a deliberate gesture, curator Khai Hori tells me over lunch the next day. Leaving the buzz of the main exhibition site behind, only the hum of crickets and the dull crunch of sand under tyres can be heard now. Then, at the end of the path, Shaikha Al Mazrou’s Contingent Object, a study of fragility and transformation, emerges from the night. A low ring of light edges a vast circle of salt water, thirty metres across. It glows like an orange, grounded moon, its colour derived from algae. I’m told that as the water evaporates throughout the exhibition, and salt crystals bloom, the orange will intensify. I wish I could visit the piece again in a month.

Al Mazrou’s work is part of the second edition of Manar Abu Dhabi, the Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi’s public light art exhibition that has quietly become one of the UAE’s most distinctive cultural offerings. This year, its programme of 22 works unfolds across Jubail Island, Al Ain’s UNESCO-listed oases, and Souq Al Mina, coinciding with Abu Dhabi Art and the debut of Nomad Abu Dhabi. Together, they have turned the emirate into a kind of circuit: galleries, dunes, courtyards, mangroves, waterfronts and an old airport, all bustling with people who seem to be travelling not only between events but between ways of seeing.

When Hori, Manar Abu Dhabi’s Artistic Director, was first approached to lead this edition, he says he was surprised. “I took down my website; my Instagram has nothing on it,” he tells me, half laughing. “I didn’t even know how they found me.” Of course, he’s being modest. His distinguished career includes serving as Deputy Director of Artistic Programming at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, as well as Senior Curator at the Singapore Art Museum. For Manar, he arrived with a proposal in hand, The Light Compass, a curatorial frame that pulled from the region’s long relationship with celestial navigation.

“Astrology, using light for prayer times, for travel across the sea or desert – all of this shaped how people lived,” he says. “I wanted to place that ancestral relationship with light next to the kind of artificial light artists use today: programmable, architectural, choreographed.” What stands out when walking Manar’s routes is how seriously the curatorial team took context. “Not everything needed to be interactive or high-tech,” Hori says. “We wanted people to build their own relationships with the works, not just be entertained.”

Reem Fadda, Director of Cultural Programming at DCT Abu Dhabi, describes Manar as part of a larger public art strategy built around the realities of the UAE’s climate, lifestyle, and pace. “We realised Abu Dhabi needed a seasonal approach,” she explains to me. “Six months of the year, people aren’t outdoors. But when the weather shifts, the evenings open up. Families are out. Kids are out. We wanted unforgettable experiences rooted in our natural landscape, our waterways, mangroves, desert, and islands.”

Across Jubail, the works form a kind of constellation, each sensitive to the land around it. Where Al Mazrou’s installation makes you look in, Ezequiel Pini’s Skyward pulls the gaze outward. A reflective plane rises at an angle, facing the night sky, while a 10.5-ton gabbro stone from Ras Al Khaimah perches above it. “I wanted a conversation between earth and sky,” Pini tells me. “The stone carries thousands, millions, of years of history. Every erosion line is a story.” As darkness falls, the mirrored screen animates the cosmos through video. “Light is imagination,” the artist proclaims. “Skyward is an attempt to bring the visible and invisible together – alignment, memory, rhythm.”

Not far away is Dutch duo DRIFT’s sprawling new installation, Whispers. Inside a sunken pit in the sand, slender illuminated stems are designed to sway with every shift of wind. “Wind is not just weather,” DRIFT’s founders Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta share. “It’s a life force, a fertiliser, a creator.” Whispers depends on wind to activate it – but tonight, with the still air, it’s the exhibition-goers brushing past and touching the work that set it in motion. “Working with wind here is a reminder that nature’s presence is constant, ever-shifting,” they tell. “We should embrace it instead of fighting it.”

If Whispers disperses, Encor Studio’s Alcove Ltd encloses and intensifies. Set inside a refurbished shipping container, the installation pulses with light, sound, and shifting reflections. “We spent years working in dark spaces,” the artists tell me. “We wanted a piece that works with the biggest light source – the sun.” Liquid-crystal laminated glass walls reveal and conceal depending on the viewer’s movement, and mist occasionally softens the edges. “We play with transparency,” they say. “Hide, reveal, reshape. Each time it’s shown, it becomes a different piece because the landscape changes.”

Then there is Pamela Tan’s Eden, a kind of desert-grown greenhouse made of steel topped with illuminated glass spheres. The spheres catch and refract the surroundings like frozen droplets. “When I hike back home [in Malaysia], I’m always looking at small details,” she tells. “Dew, vines, microscopic patterns you see when you put a leaf under a microscope.” Eden brings those forms into a dreamlike desert context. “I wanted it to feel like a single organism, like it grew here overnight,” she says. “It invites people to slow down, to linger.”

In Al Ain, Manar’s sensitivity to context becomes even more pronounced. Works are nestled inside 400-year-old mudbrick structures, along oasis trails, next to ancient mosques. “You suddenly see the architecture differently,” Hori says. “The oasis becomes more visible in your awareness.” Khalid Shafar’s Sadu Red Carpet transforms a UNESCO-listed corridor into a path of pixel-patterned bricks referencing the traditional Sadu weave. “Heritage is not displayed at a distance,” Hori says. “It’s walked. Felt underfoot.”

The timing of Manar’s opening, overlapping with Abu Dhabi Art and the first-ever Nomad Abu Dhabi, isn’t coincidental. It produces a citywide cultural moment in which contemporary art, design history, and experimental performance flow into one another.

Abu Dhabi Art, in its 17th edition, feels both like a culmination and a prelude: the last chapter before its partnership with Frieze begins next year. Manarat Al Saadiyat is at its busiest, with 142 galleries from 34 countries. While Nigeria and Turkey’s dedicated sections stand out, one of the presentations that remains at the top of my mind is Alla Abdunabi’s In the Stomach of the Earth.

Her reconstructed Roman vivarium from Apollonia, Libya, built from insulating firebricks and glass-cast fish, transforms the ancient coastal pool into a strange sort of kiln. Historically, the sea was tamed by architecture and the fish contained as both emblem and commodity. In a poetic reversal, today, the pool lies at the bottom of the sea it once tried to domesticate.

Nomad Abu Dhabi, meanwhile, makes a bold choice, taking over Terminal 1 of Zayed International Airport. The modernist building, usually a site of movement, queues, and departure boards, reveals itself as a piece of sculptural architecture. The fair uses the space with aesthetic resourcefulness: installations tucked into radial corridors, design pieces positioned to echo the terminal’s geometry, and the central dome treated not as infrastructure but as a kind of vast, confident centrepiece. The airport becomes the destination itself, a place to pause, look, and listen – an inversion that feels both playful and intelligent.

Collectively, the three events form a cultural network across the city. Manar remains the grounding force. It pulls people outdoors, into the elements, reminding us that Abu Dhabi’s landscape isn’t merely a backdrop for culture but one of its most compelling collaborators. As Hori puts it, “We try to consider everything – from where people walk, to how they arrive at a work, to how the light meets the site. A unique experience means different things to different people. But if they walk away feeling something, that’s enough.” And on Jubail, standing before Al Mazrou’s mesmerising saline circle, it is hard not to feel something.



Manar Abu Dhabi is on view until 4 January 2026; Abu Dhabi Art runs until 23 November 2025; and Nomad Abu Dhabi concludes on 22 November 2025.



Feature image: Shaikha Al Mazrou, Contingent Object, 2025. Manar Abu Dhabi 2025. Image courtesy of Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi & Public Art Abu Dhabi