NOMAD Abu Dhabi Hands Four Departure Gates to Four Galleries

Collectible Design · Abu Dhabi

Reading time: 15 min

Last year NOMAD worked out what the old Abu Dhabi airport could do. This year it has gone after the building’s most single-minded rooms, the private departure gates, and given four of them to four galleries. It has also taken a second building, and the two architects responsible turn out to have more in common than the fair is likely to mention.

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NOMAD Abu Dhabi returns to Terminal 1 of the old Abu Dhabi airport from 18 to 22 November 2026, with more than fifty exhibitors across collectible design, contemporary art, jewellery and craft. The second edition is presented in partnership with the Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi, and the clearest measure of how much has changed is not the exhibitor count. It is which rooms the fair has decided to occupy.

Four private gates have been handed to A2Z, Nilufar, Gallery FUMI and Galerie Gastou, one each, to build as complete environments. A departure gate is the most single-purpose room in any airport. It exists for one event, repeated: leaving. Giving four of them to four galleries is the most specific thing anybody has done with this building since the last aircraft pushed back from it.

Four gates, four galleries

The logic of Terminal 1 was speed. Paul Andreu drew it so that passengers entered down a sloping walkway, gathered in a circular hall, and reached nine gates arranged around that circle without walking far. Everything in the plan is about reducing the time between the kerb and the aircraft door. The gates are the end of that sequence, and they were built to be passed through rather than looked at.

The terminal’s tiled surfaces: mosaic columns and the hexagonal ceiling pattern. Photography: Tinko Czetwertynski, courtesy of NOMAD.

A2Z, Nilufar, Gallery FUMI and Galerie Gastou now each get one as a room of their own. The appeal is obvious once you have stood in one. A gate is a self-contained volume with its own ceiling, its own light from the apron side, and a door that closes. It is a gallery that nobody had to build.

What goes into them is worth knowing in advance. Gallery FUMI brings Rowan Mersh, whose Dreamcatcher is assembled from thousands of small shells laid in a tight spiral until the surface reads as a single grey disc, and Jeremy Anderson, whose Cabaret floor lamp stacks ribbed, fringed tiers like a figure in costume. Galerie Gastou shows Irene Cattaneo, whose Poison lumineux raises an alabaster flower on a pale stem to standing height and lights it from inside, and whose Fleurs Monstrueuses lamp sets an iridescent glass bloom on three thin bronze legs. Nilufar brings StudioDanielK, including the Esquisses floor lamp in copper fired to fire quartz and copper red, and the Joia desk.

Irene Cattaneo at Galerie Gastou: Poison lumineux and Fleurs Monstrueuses. Photography: © Enrico Fiorese.

These are objects that need to be walked around. Putting them in rooms built for queueing is a good joke, and it is also the correct spatial answer.

The man who drew the terminal

Terminal 1 opened on 2 January 1982, after construction began in 1979, and it replaced Al Bateen on Abu Dhabi island. Paul Andreu, born in Gironde in 1938 and a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, had opened Charles de Gaulle outside Paris in 1974, and the circular geometry of that first Paris terminal went on to shape airports around the world, Abu Dhabi among them. He built something close to forty of them, along with the Grand National Theatre in Beijing and the French terminal of the Channel Tunnel. He died in October 2018.

Terminal 1 outside and in, with an aircraft still standing on the apron. Photography: Tinko Czetwertynski, courtesy of NOMAD.

The part everyone photographs is the ceiling of the circular hall, which drops in a curve and is covered in lime green and blue tiles set in an Islamic pattern. It has been described as a palm tree seen against the sky, and from directly underneath that is exactly what it does. Elsewhere the same tiling runs down columns and into pointed arches, the window openings are drawn as pointed arches too, and in the hexagonal panels of the upper rotunda the pattern turns gold.

The building stopped working as an airport in late 2023, when Terminal A took over at what is now Zayed International. A terminal that has been retired is a rare thing to be handed: fully serviced, structurally sound, and finally free of the one requirement that governed every decision in it. The gates no longer have to deliver anyone to an aircraft, which is precisely why a gallery can have one.

Le Lab and Galerie BSL at the 2025 edition. Photography: Nikita Berezhnoy, courtesy of NOMAD.

A second building, and a coincidence worth noticing

This year NOMAD extends beyond Terminal 1 for the first time, through a partnership with ERTH Abu Dhabi, which becomes the NOMAD Hub for the week and hosts the official pop-up restaurant. ERTH is the former Armed Forces Officers Club, built between 1987 and 1997 and opened that December, and it was designed by the French architect Roger Taillibert. Its roof is usually described as a falcon settled in the desert, or as a tent, and it covers a conference centre, a theatre, sports facilities and a mosque under one gesture. It was rebranded as ERTH in 2021.

Here is the part worth sitting with. Taillibert, born in 1926 and died in 2019, is the architect of the Montreal Olympic Stadium, built for the 1976 Games, along with the Olympic pool and the velodrome that is now the Biodome. The inclined tower over the stadium was not finished until 1987, the same year work started on the Officers Club. Andreu died in October 2018 and Taillibert in October 2019, a year apart.

So NOMAD Abu Dhabi 2026 takes place across two buildings by two French architects of the same generation, both of whom worked at the scale of national spectacle, and both of whom left a major structure in this city. And the fair is directed by Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte, who was born in Montreal in 1983. The man who chose these two venues grew up in the shadow of the stadium that the architect of the second one built. Nothing in the programme points this out, and there is no reason to think it was planned. It is still the most interesting thing about the expansion.

It also sets up a neat pairing. Andreu’s terminal is a machine for leaving as efficiently as possible. Taillibert’s club is a bird that has landed.

What travels: bronze from Ouagadougou, pearl from Bahrain

Underneath the architecture, the content of this edition is material knowledge that has moved from one place to another, which is a reasonable thing to put in a building designed for arrivals.

Maison Intègre makes its NOMAD debut with bronze cast in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, by the lost-wax method. The Kassena console and the Divination table come out of that workshop, and the Wax Landscape mirror by Ambre Jarno keeps the texture of the wax model in the finished bronze rim, so the mould’s own surface survives into the metal. Two monumental tapestries from the Tree of Life series, woven and naturally dyed in Burkina Faso, hang against all that weight.

Ambre Jarno’s Wax Landscape Mirror and Timothée Chambovet’s Kassena console, both cast in Ouagadougou. Courtesy of Maison Intègre and NOMAD Abu Dhabi 2026.

Bahrain’s MATTAR brings Woven in Us, drawing on more than 180 years of family knowledge of the country’s natural pearls and developed with Bahraini weavers and designers. A bracelet of pearl tassels and a gold comb set with pearls and rubies treat the pearl as a material with a structure rather than as a finish.

From Seoul, Gallery Vein places contemporary makers alongside bandaji chest-making, ottchil lacquer and mother-of-pearl, with Woorim Kang, Jin Baek, Kuho Jung, master artisan Kangyong Park and Samyong Hwang, whose A Droplet carries mother-of-pearl across a swelling form until it reads as water. Warsaw’s Craftica Gallery brings Polish straw marquetry and carved wood, including a commission from Zofia Sobolewska Ursic, whose La Nature est un temple II lays split straw into oak in a pattern that changes direction with the light, and Palucki Studio’s Mother of the Light in bog oak, brass and parchment. Mumbai’s ÆQUŌ works with repoussé metalwork, lost-wax casting, embroidery, shellac and mother-of-pearl through Linde Freya Tangelder, Frédéric Imbert, Santa Gaia Pilens and Inderjeet Sandhu.

Samyong Hwang and Woorim Kang at Gallery Vein. Courtesy of Gallery Vein and NOMAD Abu Dhabi 2026.

Zofia Sobolewska Ursic and Palucki Studio at Craftica Gallery. Courtesy of Craftica Gallery and NOMAD Abu Dhabi 2026.

The regional commissions are the ones to watch. Irthi Contemporary Crafts Council, established under the patronage of Her Highness Sheikha Jawaher bint Mohammed Al Qasimi, works with SUPER LOOP on the Al Taif Collection, Al Thini Edition, five pieces that take the structure and rhythm of Emirati Talli weaving into furniture, with pearl inlay. And Abu Dhabi’s House of Artisans pairs with Paris’s Institut du Monde Arabe, putting designer Abdel El Tayeb, who won the Confirmed Talent category of the IMA’s 2024 Design Prize, in direct exchange with Emirati master artisans on a site-specific installation.

MATTAR’s Blue Tassel Bracelet and Gem Alf’s Circle of Sharing. Courtesy of MATTAR, Gem Alf and NOMAD Abu Dhabi 2026.

The galleries, and where to start

Carpenters arrives for the first time in its twentieth year, founded in London in 2006, with Wendell Castle’s bronze Veiled in a Dream, Nacho Carbonell’s Flying Bubble and Vincent Dubourg’s Double Buffet Nouvelle Zélande. Galleria Rossana Orlandi brings Fadi Yachoui of Atelier L’inconnu, whose She Remains bar cabinet opens a woven, body-like shell to reveal a lacquered interior, and Virginia Leonard’s heaped ceramics. Galerie Negropontes shows Ahmad Hamad’s Charlize, a cabinet wrapped in coiled oxblood tubing, and Gianluca Pacchioni’s amethyst console.

Galerie BSL returns with Pia Maria Raeder’s Sea Anemone, thousands of turned beech stems set by hand into a surface you want to touch and should not, plus Draga & Aurel and the Nada Debs collaboration with Studio Lél. LEVUMA and JCRD Design share a presentation called Objects of Desire, putting exceptional diamonds beside historical Brazilian collectible design, including a Jean Royère Trèfle chair from around 1950 and a 1959 Jorge Zalszupin tea trolley. Boghossian with Ars Belga present Light into Colour, setting high jewellery against postwar painting by Piero Dorazio, Charles Pollock, Salvo and Lorenzato. Galleria Verolino brings Sonia Delaunay’s Rythmes Ondulatoires of 1973.

Jean Royère at JCRD and Sonia Delaunay at Galleria Verolino. Courtesy of JCRD, Galleria Verolino and NOMAD Abu Dhabi 2026.

Among the first-time exhibitors from the region, Beirut’s PIK’D, founded by Randa Missir, shows ceramics and glass including Simone Crestani’s Forsythia in borosilicate, a branch blown and drawn into candle holders and a bowl. Gallery Gradient brings Nader Gammas’s Vessels. V Gallery has 6AM’s hand-blown glass podiums, solid-looking cubes of amber and clear glass, with Thierry Lemaire, Garnier & Linker and Hagit Pincovici. Parsa returns with Thomas Vlach, whose Badguir stools borrow their profile from the wind catcher. Tarek Shamma with Valerio Polimeno, NAQSH Collective, Gem Alf, Le Lab, Leila Heller Gallery, Iwan Maktabi with Don Tanani, The AP Room and Varun Kaji fill out a regional line-up that is now the backbone of the fair rather than its local colour.

6AM’s BATCH hand-blown glass podiums at V Gallery. Photography: Melania Dalle Grave, DSL Studio.

Nader Gammas at Gallery Gradient and Thomas Vlach at Parsa. Courtesy of the galleries and NOMAD Abu Dhabi 2026.

Studio Renn returns from Mumbai with [Prime]al, built from a study of Indian Indigenous art translated into jewellery, and Fernando Jorge brings the High Swirl emeralds.

Fernando Jorge’s High Swirl emeralds and Nacho Carbonell at Carpenters. Courtesy of the exhibitors and NOMAD Abu Dhabi 2026.

A wall that changes for four days

The project most worth returning to across the week is in the public art programme. Working with Public Art Abu Dhabi, the South African artist Robin Rhode will develop a progressive wall drawing and performance inside Terminal 1 over the course of the fair.

Rhode, born in Cape Town in 1976, studied at Technikon Witwatersrand and now works from Berlin. His best-known pieces are multi-panel photographic sequences in which a painted wall, usually made in public space in Johannesburg, is shot repeatedly while a figure moves in front of it, so that the choreography appears to alter the drawing from frame to frame. A wall that changes while you watch is an unusual thing to put inside a fair, because it is the one work that will not be the same on Sunday as it was on Wednesday. His work is held by the Museum of Modern Art and by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which gives it a quiet connection to what opens on Saadiyat three weeks later.

In the Departure Hall, YANGWANG presents a project with the Dubai-based artist and designer Ibrahim Zaki, known for his work with Arabic calligraphy and typography, alongside the U9 Xtreme, the electric hypercar that recorded 496.22 km/h at the Automotive Testing Papenburg track in Germany in September 2025. The ELITE Lounge by Chalhoub Group gathers Max Mara, Repossi, De Beers, Laggar and Lalique into a single setting on The Art of Living. BGRE runs the public programme, opening with Malak Abu Qaoud in conversation with Ill-Sam Park, partner and architect at Foster and Partners, on the cultural and environmental pillars of placemaking, with later talks from Sumayya Vally, Asunción Molinos Gordo, Vica Pacheco, Cristiano Pelizzari and Djiby Kebe of Air Afrique, and regional voices including Afra AlDhaheri, Nour Hage, Zainab Mohamed AlHashemi, Khalid Al Banna and Chafa Ghaddar. Irthi runs craft workshops alongside.

The week NOMAD Abu Dhabi lands in

NOMAD opens with a patrons and collectors preview on Wednesday 18 November from 2pm, followed by a VIP preview from 5pm, and is then open from 1pm to 9pm on 19, 20 and 21 November and from 1pm to 8pm on 22 November. Terminal 1 sits on Ad Diyafah Street.

Those are the same four days as Frieze Abu Dhabi, which runs from 19 to 22 November at Manarat Al Saadiyat with 89 galleries from 37 countries. The two are a short drive apart, one in a decommissioned airport and one in the cultural district, and together they give the city its densest art and design week so far. Guggenheim Abu Dhabi opens on 11 December, three weeks later. Anyone building a trip around the third week of November now has a genuine itinerary rather than a single destination.

The institutional programme in the Departure Hall is the part that will matter longest. House of Artisans, Irthi, the Design Commission Abu Dhabi making its NOMAD debut, and the Institut du Monde Arabe are all working in the same room, and FOUNT, the Abu Dhabi design store founded in 2023, curates a retail presentation of open editions and books from participating galleries. ERTH carries the rest, with breakfasts, dinners and evening gatherings through the week, and a Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial installation of its own.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

A fair held in a borrowed building usually treats the building as a backdrop. The second edition of NOMAD Abu Dhabi does the opposite, and the gates are the proof. Rather than dropping a neutral stand plan into a large shed, it has gone looking for the terminal’s most specific rooms and let four galleries have them whole.

The craft programme works the same way. Bronze cast in Ouagadougou, pearl worked in Bahrain, straw laid into oak in Warsaw, lacquer and mother-of-pearl from Seoul and Talli weaving from the Emirates are all in a building whose entire purpose was to receive things that came from somewhere else.

And then there are the two Frenchmen. Andreu drew a terminal for getting people out as fast as possible. Taillibert drew a bird that had landed. For five days in November a fair about staying put and looking carefully will be running in both of them.