Dubai Design Week has announced the five practices selected for Abwab 2026, its long-running commissioning programme. Presented under the theme In Other Words, this year’s edition will include works by Dalia Rafeh, Grace Shieh, Kanaka Raghavan, UBIK and VARUSSI, founded by Owais Asif Khan and Samreen Junaid Wani.

Taking place from 3-8 November 2026 at Dubai Design District (d3), Abwab will be presented as a curated indoor group exhibition for the first time, moving away from its established individual pavilion format of previous editions. The programme forms part of the 12^th edition of Dubai Design Week, held under the patronage of Her Highness Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Chairperson of Dubai Culture and Arts Authority (Dubai Culture), in strategic partnership with Dubai Design District (d3), a member of TECOM Group PJSC, with Faham and Tripod Global as material sponsors of Abwab 2026.

Five New Commissions for Abwab 2026:

• Dalia Rafeh, whose artistic work explores Arabic language and visual expression, presents Shhhhhhhh, transforming the familiar Arabic letter ش and its association with the call for quiet into a seven-metre installation of red light. Drawing on the visual language of public and commercial signage, the repeated form makes silence visible, inviting interpretations that move between command, pause, reflection and listening.
• Writer and visual artist Grace Shieh explores handmade paper as a language in its own right through A Library of Paper Memories. Combining papermaking, poetry and experimental writing, the installation considers how fibre, texture and form can carry memory and meaning, inviting audiences to experience reading beyond the conventional written page.
• Dubai-based designer, educator and researcher Kanaka Raghavan presents Cheent Devanagari, reconsidering Devanagari typography through the script’s own structural and material traditions. Challenging the use of Latin typography as a universal design default, the work draws on block printing and ornament, using translucent textile layers that separate and recompose as visitors move around them, transforming the construction of letterforms into a spatial experience.
• India-based conceptual artist UBIK presents Non/Sense, a floor-based intervention inspired by science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later. Through processes of translation, mistranslation, abbreviation and the use of Lorem Ipsum, fragments of text gradually evolve into visual patterns and spatial structures, questioning how language is interpreted and understood.
• VARUSSI, a Dubai-based architecture and research practice founded by Owais Asif Khan and Samreen Junaid Wani, presents Taleem, drawing on the coded system of notation used in Kashmiri carpet and Kani shawl making. Traditionally used to communicate instructions between designer and weaver, this inherited language of craft is translated into an architectural installation that visitors can physically enter and experience, revealing the knowledge embedded in traditional systems of making.

The built environment becomes part of the exhibition itself. Audiences move around, between and through the works, encountering them again from above. Rather than offering a single reading, In Other Words considers language as something that can be inhabited, inherited, interrupted, reassembled and understood differently according to where we stand.

Visitors will also have the opportunity to explore In Other Words through three free curator-led walkthroughs with Alexie Glass-Kantor, Caoimhe CJ Reynolds and the participating practitioners. The sessions will offer insights into the research, materials and creative processes behind the commissions, as well as the relationships between the works. The exhibition is free to visit as part of Dubai Design Week.

Since its inception in 2015, Abwab, meaning ‘doors’ in Arabic, has supported over 180 designers from across West, South, Southeast and East Asia, as well as the African continent. Over the years, the programme has commissioned projects responding to the cultural, social and material contexts of the regions it represents, giving participating practitioners the opportunity to develop and present new work to an international audience.

For more information about Abwab and Dubai Design Week 2026, visit dubaidesignweek.ae