Editions: Fourteen Years of Groundwork Behind Dubai’s Collectible Design Fair

DUBAI DESIGN WEEK · DUBAI

Reading time: 8 min

A ceramic vessel about chronic pain. A hand-woven textile that took weeks on the loom. An ash chair carved as a metaphor for burnout. Editions arrived at Dubai Design Week in 2024 selling objects that are neither unique artworks nor mass production, which is the hardest category in design to build a market for. Dubai has been laying the ground for it since 2012, and Editions is what that groundwork produced.

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Design has an awkward middle.

At one end sits the unique object, the one-off, which behaves like art and is bought like art. At the other sits the industrial product, made in thousands, bought like furniture. Between them is the edition: the limited run, the numbered series, the piece made by hand in twelve rather than one or twelve thousand.

Rarares Gallery

That middle is where design actually becomes collectable, and it is the hardest part of the market to establish anywhere. It requires buyers who understand that a numbered ceramic is not a mass-market vase, galleries willing to represent makers rather than brands, and a price structure that lets someone start collecting without a five-figure cheque.

Rarares Gallery

Editions, which launched at Dubai Design Week from 6 to 9 November 2024 at Dubai Design District, exists to build exactly that. It brought together more than 50 galleries, design studios and creative collectives from the UAE, Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan, Germany, Colombia, Italy, Lithuania and France, showing ceramics, prints, photography, textiles and contemporary design.

It also arrived with fourteen years of history behind it, which is the part of the story worth understanding first.

The fourteen years before Editions

Editions did not arrive from nowhere. It is the third stage of a project Dubai has been running since 2012, and each stage taught the next one something.

Design Days Dubai launched in 2012 as the only fair of its kind in the Middle East and South Asia, dedicated to collectible and limited-edition design. It ran for five editions to 2016, showing established international galleries alongside emerging regional makers, and it was deliberately more than a sales floor, carrying talks, workshops, installations and performances. It was founded and directed by Cyril Zammit, who went on to create Dubai Design Week itself.

John Martin Gallery / Taste Contemporary

Rawan Kashkoush, who headed programming for both, described what it was for: “Design Days Dubai acted as Dubai’s very own wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, gathering design pieces” from around the world “for collectors, the design interested and the inquisitive public to experience.”

A cabinet of curiosities is a good description of what a collectible design fair does at the start. It builds the appetite first, which is the necessary step before anyone can build the market.

In January 2018, Design Days Dubai was folded into Downtown Design and relaunched as Downtown Editions, a curated section within the larger commercial furniture fair, moving from March to November. The then fair director, Rue Kothari, framed it as “uniting commerce and creativity”, connecting brands and designers to Middle East buyers.

John Martin Gallery / Taste Contemporary

That was a shrewd move rather than a retreat. A section inside an established commercial fair inherits footfall and buyers that a standalone fair has to win from scratch, and it put collectible design directly in front of the region’s specifying architects and interior designers every November. Six years of that is how you build a buyer base.

By 2024 the audience was there, and the category was ready for a room of its own again. Editions is that room.

What an edition actually looked like on the stands

The best way to understand what the fair is arguing for is to look at what was in it, and the works divided along material lines rather than gallery ones.

Ceramics carried the most weight, which is unsurprising, because ceramics is the discipline where the edition has always been most natural. Virginia Leonard, shown by John Martin Gallery with Taste Contemporary, makes sculptural vessels that deal directly with bodily trauma and chronic pain, and they look like it: heavy, glossed, deliberately unresolved forms that refuse the smooth competence usually expected of studio ceramics. Valeria Isyak, the Ukrainian artist shown by Rarares Gallery, worked a different register entirely.

Mark Hachem Gallery
Textiles produced the most quietly impressive thing in the room. Ptolemy Mann is an abstract woven textile artist, and her work is hand-dyed and hand-woven rather than printed, with colour built up through the dyeing of the yarn before a single thread reaches the loom. That process is precisely why the edition exists as a category. Nobody can make a hundred of them, and nobody should try.

Optical and kinetic wall work came through Mark Hachem Gallery, with Rafael Barrios, the Venezuelan sculptor whose steel forms appear to shift and fold as you move past them, and José Margulis, who layers cut acrylic so that flat planes read as impossible volumes. Both make work whose entire subject is the viewer’s movement, which makes them well suited to a fair, where nobody stands still.

Mark Hachem Gallery

Furniture in limited runs was represented by KAMEH, with hand-sculpted ash chairs from a limited series that took forest regeneration and recovery from burnout as their theme. Ash is a good choice for that argument. It is a tough, open-grained hardwood that bends well and shows its growth rings plainly, so a carved ash chair carries the evidence of the tree in its surface.

Elsewhere, Aassttiinn showed a nature-led installation curated by Made in Tehran with POST INTERIOR, Hestia Gallery brought furniture working between classical and contemporary form, and Inloco showed Neda Salmanpour’s Sandscapes, a geometric reading of how red sand moves. Salmanpour is worth watching: she went on to co-create Resonance, the suspended metal installation in Al Shindagha commissioned under the Dubai Public Art programme.

The strategy is the price list

The most important decision Editions made is not curatorial. It is commercial, and it is the thing that separates it from Design Days Dubai.

The fair is explicit that it works across varied price points, aimed at people at every stage of a collecting life rather than at established collectors alone. Mette Degn-Christensen, director of Downtown Design, put the purpose plainly: “Editions offers a new platform where visitors can connect with independent designers and discover works that are otherwise inaccessible in the Middle East.” Khadija Al Bastaki, senior vice president of d3, framed the civic version, describing a fair that lets “individuals to be more active patrons” while giving emerging talent a credible platform.

Aassttiinn

That is the correct strategy, and it is worth being clear about why.

A collectible design market is built from the base up. Blue-chip collectors are mobile, buying at Design Miami and PAD and through dealers, and they follow a new fair in a new city once it has a following of its own. What a market needs is a base: several hundred people who bought their first numbered print or signed ceramic at thirty-something and are still buying at fifty. That base is built at entry prices, in a room that welcomes you in.

Aassttiinn

Dubai has the demographic conditions for it. The city ranked seventh globally among art fair cities in Artsy’s 2024 report, it has a large, young, high-earning professional population, and it has spent a decade building the design literacy that makes people want an object with a maker’s name on it. What Editions adds is the on-ramp.

Running the fair inside Dubai Design Week is the other half of the strategy, because it puts the works in front of an audience already walking the district for the installations and the exhibitions. Design Days Dubai stood alone in March. Editions borrows a crowd.

Two editions in

Editions returned for a second edition from 5 to 9 November 2025, with a preview on the fifth, on the Waterfront Terrace at d3, alongside Downtown Design.

Hestia Gallery

The exhibitor list is the useful signal. Names included Zawyeh Gallery, Wadi Finan Art Gallery, Bureau of Innovation, Superbia Domus, Latina Dsgn, Hilton Contemporary, A.D.U. Studio, Tokio and Asateer, alongside individual makers such as Ila Colombo, Antilla Di Lauro and Badih Ghanem. AASSTTIINN returned from the inaugural edition.

Returning exhibitors are the metric that matters for a young fair. Galleries come back to a stand that sold, so a second edition with repeat participants is a considerably better indicator than any attendance figure. On that measure, Editions cleared its first real hurdle comfortably.

Hestia Gallery

The move to the Waterfront Terrace also gives it a defined address within d3 rather than a temporary structure, which matters more than it sounds. Fairs that move venue annually struggle to build the habit of return visits.

What builds from here

Two things give Editions its momentum from here, and both are already in place.

The entry-level buyer becoming a repeat buyer. Selling somebody their first print is straightforward at a well-attended festival. Getting them back the following November, at a higher price, for a second piece, is the whole business, and the varied price points are built for exactly that. With the November slot and Design Week crowd secured, 2026 and 2027 are the years that compound it.

KAMEH

Regional makers carrying the same weight as the international galleries. The strongest argument for a fair like this is that it gives makers in the UAE, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine a commercial platform they cannot easily access otherwise. The exhibitor lists so far are genuinely mixed, with regional galleries showing alongside international ones, and holding that balance as the fair grows is one of its real strengths.

KAMEH

Dubai Design Week returns from 3 to 8 November 2026, with Downtown Design running from the fourth to the eighth. On the pattern of the first two years, Editions should sit inside those dates.

Frequently asked questions

Inloco

Inloco

Final thoughts

Editions can be read as one more fair on a busy November calendar, reviewed by listing who showed what.

The more useful reading is that Dubai has been building towards this for fourteen years, and each stage did a job. Design Days Dubai created the appetite and proved there was an audience for objects like these. Downtown Editions put them in front of the region’s buyers every November for six years and built the habit. Editions is what those two things make possible: a fair with its own room, Design Week’s crowd, and prices that let somebody begin.

The objects make the case better than the strategy does. A vessel that carries chronic pain in its surface, a textile whose colour was decided before the weaving began, a chair carved from ash because ash shows its own growth. None of these can be made in volume, and none of them are one-offs either. They are the middle, and the middle is where design stops being a purchase and becomes a collection.

Dubai has given it fourteen years of groundwork and a room of its own. On that foundation, Editions is built to last.