Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial Returns With 21 Artists Asking What Home Means

Twenty-one artists, six sites and one very personal question

What does home mean in a city where so many of us come from somewhere else? That is the question at the heart of the second Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial, which opens tomorrow, 23 October, in Al Ain, before spreading across Abu Dhabi city from 15 November. Both parts run until 15 February 2027, out in the open, where anyone can come across them.

For anyone less familiar with it, the biennial is organised by the Department of Culture and Tourism, Abu Dhabi (DCT Abu Dhabi). Its first edition, Public Matter, ran across Abu Dhabi and Al Ain from November 2024 to April 2025, with works including Wael Al Awar's dome Barzakh on the Corniche, Paweł Althamer's cat-shaped Tentarium and works by Kader Attia, Wael Shawky and Emily Jacir. Several of those works were later acquired to stay in the city for good.

This year's edition is smaller but bolder, with an emphasis on monumental, site-specific works. Its artistic director is Elvira Dyangani Ose, who led MACBA in Barcelona and is now Artistic Director of Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, working with a curatorial team that includes Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Carmen Salah Hassan and Rahul Gudipudi. Titled Home: A Glossary for a Communal Sense of Place, it brings together 21 Emirati and international artists from 12 countries, showing 23 works across six sites: Al Qattara Oasis and Al Towayya Roundabout in Al Ain, and Souq Al Mina, Mina Zayed, Hidd Al Saadiyat and the Saadiyat Cultural District in Abu Dhabi.

According to the biennial, home is treated "not as a fixed geography or a singular identity, but as a shared and evolving condition", something "collectively authored through language, memory, ritual, and everyday practice". Speaking to The National, Dyangani Ose put it more simply: "The question that I have always pursued is the idea of what makes us come together." She was also clear about what she did not want. "We didn't want anything that felt artificial," she said. "That engagement with the material culture has to be real and vivid."

Encouragingly, artists from our region are central to the programme. In Al Ain, the youngest artist in the line-up, Emirati artist Roudhah Al Mazrouei (b. 2003), who was born in the city, has created Tassa, a monumental public landscape inspired by the traditional Emirati gold headpiece, developed with children through a series of workshops. Moroccan artist M'barek Bouhchichi reimagines the pigeon tower in a work whose title, I am not the stone thrown into the water, but the seed sown in the field, comes from Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North, with a sea shanty rendered in Braille across its structures.

Inside Al Qattara Oasis, part of Al Ain's UNESCO World Heritage site, Spanish artist Asunción Molinos Gordo has built rammed-earth walls that trace the aflaj, the ancient irrigation channels that still water the oasis, while Indian artist Reena Saini Kallat has repurposed early twentieth-century acoustic aircraft locators to play the calls of extinct and endangered birds.

In Abu Dhabi, Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari presents Above and Below (2026), an olive tree whose roots wrap around an ancient sarcophagus, an allegory of heritage and restitution. Emirati artists Khalid Al Banna, whose work pays tribute to fishing nets and the communities that used them, and Shama Al Hamed also show in the capital. They are joined by a strong international list: Ibrahim Mahama, Yinka Shonibare, Laure Prouvost, Kapwani Kiwanga, Nari Ward, Mercedes Azpilicueta, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Marinella Senatore, Iván Argote, Jean-Marie Appriou, Elena del Rivero, Serge Attukwei Clottey, Vica Pacheco and the Ghanaian collective blaxTARLINES.

The timing is significant, too. The Abu Dhabi works open on 15 November, the same week as the first Frieze Abu Dhabi at Manarat Al Saadiyat (19 to 22 November), and less than a month before Guggenheim Abu Dhabi opens on 11 December. Part of the biennial will sit in the park between Zayed National Museum and Louvre Abu Dhabi, at the very heart of the Saadiyat Cultural District.

So, what can we take away from this? In a city in the middle of a museum boom, a biennial that takes art to an oasis, a roundabout and a working port, and asks residents what home means to them, feels like a welcome counterweight to the grand openings. As Dyangani Ose told The National, she hopes visitors will find "something magical, something new, something that made them think differently." We can't wait to see it.

The Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial runs in Al Ain from 23 October 2026 and in Abu Dhabi from 15 November 2026, until 15 February 2027.

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