“I am curating something I don’t know yet,” says the artist Issam Kourbaj, who is putting together this year’s Beyond Emerging Artists programme at Abu Dhabi Art. “In previous things I have curated, I know the objects, I am putting them together. Here I am curating something immaterial and that was the magic for me.”

The annual project brings together three up-and-coming artists based in the United Arab Emirates to create works to be exhibited at the fair, which takes place 19-23 November at Manarat al-Saadiyat in Abu Dhabi. But the works are not finished yet—as well as curating the show, Kourbaj is mentoring the artists, helping them to conceive and create something new. “They are weaving their ideas and I am weaving with them,” he explains.

Issam Kourbaj at his exhibition at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge Photo: Courtesy Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge

Kourbaj is a renowned and respected artist with a long career. Born in Syria, he trained in Damascus, St Petersburg and London, and now lives in Cambridge, UK, where he teaches at the University of Cambridge, as well as continuing to exhibit his own work. He picked the three participants from a shortlist, looking for artists who work in very different materials, but who are connected by their response to place. “I wanted to take the local and see how you could magnify it to become a universal language,” he explains.

Salmah Almansoori is from the western region of the UAE, now based in Abu Dhabi. Her work is rooted in personal memory and the overlooked details of her hometown. Maktoum Al Maktoum’s work reflects his cross-disciplinary education: he studied psychology and real estate planning. The third artist, Alla Abdunabi, is a British-Libyan whose practice explores the “material afterlives of objects”.

The commissions will be on show during the fair—which will be relaunched next year as Frieze Abu Dhabi—in a display titled Water Carves, Land Holds, Body Remembers. “Through their interventions, locations become vessels of collective meditation on what slips through, what holds on, and what we carry forward,” says a curatorial text. “The artists invite viewers to reflect on how place shapes identity, and how art can reinterpret, preserve, or reimagine cultural legacies.”

For the first time this year, the artists will not just present their commissions at the fair—they have also created work to be shown outdoors in the city of Al Ain, around 80 miles from Abu Dhabi. “I told them I would like them to create two pieces,” says Kourbaj. “One at the fair, and one at Al Ain. They stand alone but they converse with each other. You see one part of the story, then you see another part of the story.”

They will be positioned in and around Al Ain’s historical sites, including the Al Ain Oasis, the Jebel Hafeet Tombs and the Al Jahili Fort. Kourbaj has also been commissioned to create a work there, and all will be on show for around six months (19 November-26 April 2026), providing a much slower pace than that of the fair.

“We are living in the world of the mobile phone,” says Kourbaj. “This kind of connection is becoming part of our nature. But instead of virtual connection, I want people to physically to visit [both sites] and make a bridge between the two of them.”

The trio will also get a chance to show their work in prestigious venues around the world. The 2024 commissions by Fatma Al Ali, Dina Nazmi Khorchid and Simrin Mehra Agarwal, for example, were subsequently shown at Sotheby’s Maison in Hong Kong and the Saatchi Gallery in London, thanks to Abu Dhabi Art’s global partner, HSBC

Kourbaj is impressed with the young artists and excited to see the finished works. “They are still in their twenties but they have this kind of universal place in their thinking. They are not standing in one place only thinking of that place, but they create a very long neck somehow to see what is literally beyond their physical existence.”

• Abu Dhabi Art, Manarat al-Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi, 19-23 November