The U.A.E., alongside the MENA region at large, is making clear that art and culture sit at the center of its national agenda and future identity. The evidence is everywhere: the growing constellation of museums on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island, the surge of new galleries opening across Dubai and now Frieze’s takeover of the historic Abu Dhabi Art fair beginning next year after this successful and already more international 17th edition, an announcement that arrived only months before the launch of the first edition of Art Basel Qatar in February.
Opening in conjunction with the 17th edition of Abu Dhabi Art and following the success of its 2023 inaugural debut, Manar Abu Dhabi transforms and activates some of the most fascinating public, historical and natural sites in the city’s landscape, with twenty-two site-specific works unfolding across Abu Dhabi’s mangroves, sandbanks and urban edges. Conceived under the umbrella of Public Art Abu Dhabi, in its second edition and now formally operating as an open-air biennial, Manar had its first artistic director this year. Internationally renowned curator Khai Hori (also former deputy director of artistic programming at Palais de Tokyo in Paris) helped shape its curatorial concept and its specific relationship with the context in which it takes place, working alongside co-curators Alia Zaal Lootah and Munira Al Sayegh with assistant curator Mariam Alshehhi. Titled “The Light Compass,” the open-air exhibition explores the Gulf’s ancestral relationship with light not only as an artistic medium but also as an energetic and mnemonic vessel—a device of orientation and reorientation in the past as much as an emotional and empathic one in the present.
While the notion of a community-oriented “light art festival” might make much of the art world assume this will translate into the usual immersive digital spectacle designed for families, an entertainment format that often collapses aesthetics and sensation into Instagram-ready consumption, Manar—like Noor Riyadh (opening in the same days) and other biennials and art festivals emerging in the region centered on time- and technology-based media and public art—contains far more depth, conceptual grounding and a serious site-specific curatorial intent.
<img decoding="async" class="lazyload size-full-width wp-image-1601754" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==" data-src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/11/Pamela-Tan-Eden-2025.-Manar-Abu-Dhabi-2025.-Image-courtesy-of-DCT-Abu-Dhabi.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="A large circular pavilion made from white sculptural arches is brightly lit at night and framed by two palm tree trunks in the foreground." width="970" height="647" data-caption='Pamela Tan, <em>Eden</em>, 2025. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Image courtesy of DCT Abu Dhabi</span>’>
Manar Abu Dhabi was born from a fundamental question: What defines Abu Dhabi and its beauty? Part of the answer lies in its natural surroundings. “Abu Dhabi is an archipelago of small islands, surrounded by extraordinary mangroves. We wanted to highlight these natural reserves through public art,” Reem Fadda, director of the Cultural Foundation and Abu Dhabi Cultural Programmes, who curated the inaugural edition, told Observer ahead of our visit. “We created Manar—meaning ‘lighthouse’—to shine a light on these shorelines and landscapes. Water, light, nature and art became its core formula.”
Both in the inaugural and this year’s edition, works on view were commissioned from internationally known artists active across digital and institutional contexts as well as artists in the region who have already developed a creative language rooted in the intersection of art and new technologies. Many of them have grown up watching their country undergo accelerated modernization, which has magnified the distance between tradition and the future, but they often found in the new technologies the means and tools to reconnect with nearly lost ancestral practices through the fluidity of time, space and contemplation allowed by media and time-based works.
In the end, light is where everything begins. Reality, as a phenomenon, only exists for our eyes through it. Manar pushes the idea of light further. Here, light unveils the thread and the source that still connects the present to the past and to our potential futures, running throughout and allowing multiple forms of artistic and creative expression to manifest, from the spark of intuition emerging from darkness to an idea written on paper illuminated first by a torch then by an LED bulb, to the electricity that activates pixels into images and meaning, and even earlier to the fire around which primordial storytelling first took shape.
Further emphasizing its role as an energetic channel between past, present and future in the country’s cultural formation, the biennial extends beyond the city’s central districts for the first time, engaging sites that reveal a more diverse identity. New installations interact with ancient history in Al Ain, a desert oasis and UNESCO World Heritage site, and expand into new locations across Abu Dhabi, including Jubail Mangrove Park, underscoring the festival’s ambition to broaden its cultural reach throughout the region.
Khai Hori acknowledged that expansion brought challenges. All works had to comply with strict heritage and environmental protocols now in place, requiring dialogue with archaeologists and biologists to safeguard both the past and future of this land, which reveals itself under Manar’s light to be extraordinarily rich culturally and naturally, far beyond the glossy futuristic skyline of luxury condos and hospitality-driven development. But these constraints appear to have strengthened the exhibition, prompting curators and artists, both local and international, to engage deeply with experts and gain a more authentic understanding of the cultural, historical and ecological contexts in which their works would take shape.
<img decoding="async" class="lazyload wp-image-1601752 size-full-width" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==" data-src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/11/Khalid-Shafar-Sadu-Red-Carpet-2025-Image-courtesy-of-DCT-Abu-Dhabi-4.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="A historic desert fort and surrounding palm trees are illuminated in red light as a glowing patterned pathway runs across the sandy ground." width="970" height="634" data-caption='Khalid Shafar, <em>Sadu Red Carpet</em>, 2025. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>AHMED ALNAJI | Courtesy of DCT Abu Dhabi</span>’>
The result is a constellation of technology- and light-based multimedia works that, even when installed in historical sites or protected natural areas, integrate with an almost seamless, symbiotic grace. Our journey began in the historical city of Al Ain, where one of the first artworks encountered was Khalid Shafar’s Sadu Red Carpet. A thread of red light is woven into a carpet, guiding visitors through the remains of a 400-year-old fort. Drawing inspiration from Emirati Sadu weaving, a craft recognized by UNESCO and traditionally used for blankets and tents, Shafar transforms its black-and-white alternation into a glowing red light emanating from the floor, expanding into the body and beyond into the landscape. It envelops its surroundings with a shared glow and energetic aura while returning the traditional motif as a digital-seeming pixel field. The carpet becomes a mosaic that reads like both pattern and code.
The intervention required substantial production work, replacing floor tiles with LED modules while navigating heritage regulations. The result weaves past and present into a single thread of continuity while resonating especially with younger audiences through its digitally inflected pixel-like aesthetic. As its caption reads, “Heritage is not displayed at a distance. It is walked and felt underfoot.”
Other installations in Al Ain invite visitors to reattune to the rhythms of nature. Among them is “Breath of the Same Place” by Maitha Hamdan, an Emirati artist born in Al Ain, which makes the installation a poignant homecoming and an intimate reconnection with her land. Wrapped around ancient six-meter-high trees, the most resilient species in the desert, the work makes tangible the energies they hold, channeling a primordial continuity. The twinkling lights form a lyrical choreography with sound, grounding viewers in earthly sensation while lifting them into a realm of mythical memory. Here, light guides a measured encounter with both our human and planetary pasts.
This attunement and reconnection with nature is also evident in Christian Brinkman’s Floral Resonance 2025, an interactive audiovisual installation that renders plant–human relations tangible through a VR-driven rendering system responsive to plant movement. The images arise from an invisible magnetic field of interaction that predates language and operates on a primordial energetic level. While technologically modest compared to what A.I. could now help achieve, the work poignantly highlights the essential and often overlooked interdependencies that bind us within a broader multispecies ecosystem.
As a grand finale in Al Ain, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s mesmerizing light installation Pulse Canopy gathers quiet energy from visitors, translating each heartbeat into rays of light that form shifting shapes and temporary shelters in the sky. A hand on the sensor renders the body suddenly visible, ten beams rising and falling in rhythm, turning the canopy at Al Qattara into a shared breathing ceiling where time dilates and the space responds in paced illumination. Nearby, his Translation Stream carries contemporary poems by Nujoom Alghanem, Khalid Albudoor and Adel Khozam as a soft current across the courtyard floor, its drifting letters shifting between Arabic and English as sensors register each step. Language appears before meaning, a shared symbolic code gathering viewers into temporary relation as the projected flow responds to movement, breeze and night.
A similarly captivating demonstration of light’s power to create regenerative rituals of community and imagination unfolds on Jubail Island, one of more than two hundred islands in Abu Dhabi’s archipelago. Set between Saadiyat and Yas and anchored by dense mangrove habitat, the island also contains two pre-Islamic archaeological sites that speak to a far older human presence, and this year becomes the main site for Manar.
This additional context does not appear in official narratives, yet speaking with the curators reveals its significance. The site was largely empty except for construction machinery tied to ongoing development that will add residential neighborhoods, a mangrove eco-park and ADREA, the Abu Dhabi Equestrian Art School. Using the island for Manar is not only a creative intervention but also a pause in the relentless transformation, returning the land to community recreational use, if only temporarily. As night falls, Studio DRIFT’s choreography of drones rises into the sky, floating and creating amphibious shapes that bridge the earth, sea and air.
Lachlan Turczan’s Gateway, a gate of mist and laser light, forms a porous luminous portal into parallel dimensions—symbolic, imaginative, spiritual—that coexist with the sensory world revealed in the passing. Known for laser-based water projects, Turczan works to make the invisible visible, coaxing latent forces into a brief perceptible form that sharpens both sensory and imaginative reception.
As a ritual of passage or initiation, Turczan’s Gateway leads into Studio DRIFT’s Whispers, where light follows wind across a high circular dune as the sun gently nourishes a field of wild weeds. The installation is designed to be experienced from multiple perspectives—beside it, within it and above it—as visitors navigate shifting scales of land, nature, light and energy. During our visit, the wind was still, so the stems did not sway into illumination. Yet that absence emphasized the work’s fundamental principle. When wind arrives, the drone constellations cannot appear. The installation attunes itself to nature’s rhythm, embracing contingency as part of its design.
Another DRIFT installation, Unfold, reveals our inner genetic and energetic ties to nature. Blooming flowers open into kaleidoscopic formations nurtured by visitors’ biometric data. Capturing each heartbeat in real time, an algorithm generates visuals inspired by local flora, constantly shifting yet unexpectedly organic despite the hyper-technological framework.
Continuing onward, Ezequiel Pini’s Skyward in the middle of the desert opens another immersive portal into other spatial and temporal realms, a contemporary altar that invites reconnection with the cosmos and its forces. Installed among the mangroves, its tilted mirrored surface is anchored to the ground by a single sculpted stone while reflecting both the landscape and the open sky. Animated constellations emerge as visitors approach, transforming the sculpture into a threshold between digital and physical space, earth and celestial realms.
A short walk from it, Kristen Berg’s Compound Eye (2015) further extends this dialogue between micro and macro. A mirrored sculpture first shown at Burning Man, it gathers and disperses light like a compact solar instrument, shifting from a reflective beacon by day to an illuminated field by night. Stand before its lens-like spheres and your image appears at the center of each mirror. Move and your reflection dissolves into others, staging perception as an interplay between self and collective consciousness.
However, it is at the heart of Jubail’s mangrove forest that Shaikha Al Mazrou’s intervention yields one of the island’s most striking land-and-light works. Working with natural compounds derived from algae, without chemicals or artificial materials, she transforms an orange-lit tidal pool into a primordial basin, evoking the earliest origins of life. The Contingent Object is a study in fragility and transformation, a thirty-meter salt circle that begins as still water before deepening in color and crystallizing through the effects of heat, wind and evaporation. What is fluid becomes solid; what is invisible becomes luminous.
With a similar message, Pamela Tan’s Eden (2025) invites visitors into a skeletal garden where micro and macro worlds intersect. Inspired by the generative harmony of the mythical Eden, she constructs a breathing ecosystem of articulated steel structures and glass spheres that gather and refract light. Painted in white, ghostly yet celestial, the installation recalls nineteenth-century glasshouses and faint memories of Paxton’s Crystal Palace, reimagined as a contemporary field where nature is framed rather than replaced.
Toward the exit, a capsule of light, sound and suspended perception rises like an energetically and spiritually charged echo chamber. Encor Studio’s Alcove Ltd uses violently pulsing electric light as both medium and metaphor. Rhythm, reflection and refraction unfold like an elemental pulse. Installed inside a six-meter recycled shipping container, its liquid-crystal laminated walls transform the structure into a mutable light box, suspending viewers between clarity and opacity, illumination and shadow. As visitors approach the glowing container, sensors translate movement into sequences that multiply and dissolve across mirrored surfaces until the image and environment loop into one another. Yet each viewer remains outside the capsule, out of the phenomenon, even as they activate it as a choreography oscillating between isolation and emergence, appearance and disappearance, spectatorship and agency.
In this sense, Alcove Ltd ends up exemplifying the deeper function of many Manar installations, becoming a charged station for imagination, where perception folds into sensation and the unexplainable magic of phenomena briefly takes form. In this suspended zone, future possibilities take shape, and light illuminates endless alternative scenarios to the present experience.
Like Manar as a whole, the installation operates both symbolically and experientially, reminding us not only of light’s power but also of darkness as the generative field where energy gathers and transforms. By creating these symbolic sites of light, art and nature, Manar gestures toward the renewed capacity of contemporary communities to gather in shared ritual, finding moments of contemplation and quiet collective spirituality that restore a sense of belonging to a cyclical order of energies and forces more extensive than our own lives.
The role of public art in the city’s future
Timed to coincide with the best season of the year, Manar serves as both an open-air exhibition and a citywide cultural encounter, bringing value to the diverse communities living in the city, the Emirates and the broader region well before aiming to become merely an attraction for the international art world or a future engine of tourism.
Although the festival had only just opened when we visited, each site was already filled with families and young couples, suggesting that the initiative is quickly becoming part of the city’s life and an early source of creative inspiration for its future.
This, however, is not new for Abu Dhabi or the U.A.E. The city has long invested in public art, as Fadda explained. “The city has approached it through various iterations, strategies and government entities, and public art monuments here date back to the 1970s,” she noted. “We also have modern heritage public artworks that have been formally registered, so there is a deep history in Abu Dhabi of both public art and the care that surrounds it.”
Fadda has played a leading role in shaping the emirate’s public-art strategy both as co-curator of the previous Manar edition and as artistic director of Public Art Abu Dhabi (PAAD). Around 2019-21, she said, renewed discussions began about how to rethink and expand public art amid major museum and institutional investments. The key question became how to engage local audiences more directly and bring public art into contemporary civic discourse rather than relying on the traditional representational function of monuments. In short: How can we take public art into the streets in a visible, intentional way?
This prompted the team to develop a strategy rooted in Abu Dhabi’s specific conditions. “We have six months of extreme heat and harsh weather, which naturally limits outdoor audiences, and some materials simply don’t hold up,” she said. “So we asked what model might truly work here—something event-based, rooted in community engagement and meaningful on its own terms.”
From those priorities emerged an annual program centered on two alternating flagship events, each emphasizing public relevance and significance. Alongside Manar is the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial, launched last year. In both events, most works are newly commissioned for Abu Dhabi, embedded in its fabric and speaking directly to the city and its inhabitants. “They’re very much site-specific—or, perhaps more accurately ‘city-specific,’” Fadda added. Even when a pre-existing work seems appropriate, it is often adapted in dialogue with the place.
Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial forms the second pillar of the program, one of the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi’s (DCT Abu Dhabi) major long-term initiatives. Its inaugural edition, titled “Public Matter,” ran last year from November 2024 through April 30 2025, exploring what public matters in Abu Dhabi’s unique context of urban space, environment, community and heritage. “This one is more inward-facing,” Fadda explained, focused on permanent infrastructure, durable materials and community-rooted commissions that become long-term fixtures. “These works are meant to populate different areas of Abu Dhabi and build a legacy of permanent public art.”
Participants included Emirati and international artists: Allora & Calzadilla, Farah Al Qasimi, Kader Attia, Christopher Joshua Benton, guBuyoBand, Hashel Al Lamki, Kabir Mohanty, Khalil Rabah, Oscar Murillo, Radhika Khimji, Sammy Baloji, Tarik Kiswanson, Wael Al Awar, Zeinab Alhashemi and others.
In Manar, as in the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial, site-specificity is essential. One emblematic project Fadda highlights is Christopher Joshua Benton’s intervention in the car park of Souq Al Mina. “There is a beautiful historic Afghan carpet market there, built in the 1960s by Sheikh Zayed as a gift to the Afghan carpet sellers—a true home away from home for that community,” she said. Working closely with Afghan, Iranian and Pakistani vendors, Benton created a monumental astroturf carpet that honors their knowledge, culture and diasporic histories. The work will remain on site for three years as a living monument to that community.
Beyond these events, Public Art Abu Dhabi has established a comprehensive commissioning program and master plan for the entire emirate. Manar Abu Dhabi, for instance, also features an active public program that integrates art, technology and community through talks, lectures and workshops developed in partnership with organizations such as Fujifilm, The Knot and Gracia Farms. The program also includes performances, among them Bedouin Burger, Haepaary and Ars Nova Napoli, and wellness and nature-focused activities such as guided meditations, nature walks and sustainability initiatives led by the Environment and Nature Department of Abu Dhabi’s Mangrove Initiative. In collaboration with WE ARE ONA and Luca Pronzato, WE ARE ONA x Manar Abu Dhabi presents an immersive dining experience by guest chef Solemann Haddad.
“It’s a large-scale, long-term endeavor that we’re developing steadily,” Fadda said. “But at the heart of it, the priority has always been the community—creating a shared language of engagement around art, setting the stage for everything people will soon encounter in museums and cultural spaces across the city.” So far, the response has been extraordinary. “Each project has had remarkable reach—in the hundreds of thousands, even millions—especially the public art biennial.”
Most importantly, she stresses, all of these projects are conceived as legacy initiatives, laying the foundations for long-term art production, public engagement and cultural memory. “We’ll only truly understand their impact 10 or 20 years from now, when they’ve set historical precedents and become evidence of how art history is taking shape,” she said. “That’s what I’m eager to witness. We already find ourselves referencing the first edition’s Manar, and now we’re in the second—the accumulation of these iterations is, honestly, priceless for a city.”
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