Each autumn, the space beneath Louvre Abu Dhabi’s great perforated dome becomes a gallery, and the museum’s rain of light falls on contemporary art rather than the collection’s millennia. On 11 November, Art Here returns for its sixth edition — and for the first time, it looks east across the Indian Ocean.
This year’s theme, Confluences, traces the currents of trade, migration and cultural exchange that have bound India and the Gulf for centuries, and the competition was opened accordingly: alongside GCC citizens and residents, Indian nationals were invited to submit for the first time. More than 300 proposals arrived. Six artists made the cut — Saudi artist Ahaad Alamoudi, Emirati painter Almaha Jaralla, Dubai-based Malaysian artist Muhammad Shamin Sahrum, and the Indian artists Ravikumar Kashi, Reena Kallat and Vivek Vilasini — and their commissioned works will be shown beneath the dome until 28 February 2027.
The exhibition is curated by Kamini Sawhney, founding director of Bengaluru’s Museum of Art and Photography, who also joins a jury that includes collector and patron Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan bin Khalifa, Louvre Abu Dhabi’s director of scientific, curatorial and collections management Guilhem Andre, and Maya Allison, founding executive director of the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Galleries. Later in the season, one of the six will receive the Richard Mille Art Prize and the US$60,000 that accompanies it — the watchmaker’s wager, now six editions old, that patronage belongs as naturally to haute horlogerie as complications do.
The timing is no accident. Art Here opens into the busiest cultural month Abu Dhabi has ever staged, with Frieze making its debut on Saadiyat days later and the Guggenheim’s opening on the horizon. Under the dome, the season starts here.
