Dubai Design Week 2015
A celebration of design from the Middle East and around the world, Dubai Design Week will bring an eclectic program to Dubai for its first edition.
Conceived and managed by the Art Dubai Group, Dubai Design Week is held in partnership with Dubai Design District (d3) and is supported by the Dubai Design & Fashion Council and the Dubai Culture & Arts Authority (Dubai Culture).
Dubai Design Week aims to cement the city’s reputation as the design capital of the region, attracting visitors to the city for a six-day celebration of ground-breaking ideas across a raft of creative platforms, spanning public installations, architecture, product, industrial and graphic design. It will seek to reflect the city’s potential by offering a level field for designers and design programmes from all over the city. Residents and visitors are invited to explore, discover and interact with a diverse and convention-puncturing programme of exhibitions, installations and events, with the newly developed creative hub d3 at the heart of it.
Dubai Design Week centers on the third edition of Downtown Design one of the fastest growing design fairs in the Emirates, presenting an expertly curated series of brands and makers. Ranging from furniture to kitchen, textiles and lighting, 90 brands from more than 24 countries will exhibit their designs. Georg Jensen, Taschen, Ginger & Jagger, and Abu Dhabi-based designers Fouad Mizra and Ritchie Nolasco who will present their traditional Egyptian marquetry furniture will be some of the standout designers on display. Downtown Design will be held at d3.
“As a B2B platform, we want to offer all our exhibitors an opportunity to showcase new products in a curated environment, surrounded by the best brands, both established and emerging from around the region and beyond,” said Downtown Design Fair Director, Rue Kothari.
Dubai Design Week has also partnered with six international design fairs – Helsinki, Istanbul, San Francisco, Mexico, Beijing and Melbourne – who will showcase numerous unique brands, revealing the unique design styles of each city. The exhibition is called Destination and will see designers such as Melbourne’s Christopher Boots, Ben-Tovim and Andre Hnatojko, showcase their pieces, which have been exclusively designed for the event. There will also be other renowned designers such as San Francisco’s Hello Lumio, Helsinki’s Saas, Beijing’s Zao Zuo and Ediciones Jalapa from Mexico who will introduce a new collection of furniture made from palm leaves.
One of the standout components of the event is ABWAB, a series of six pavilions built to showcase the work of the most exciting designers, studios and curators from six different countries in the MENASA region. The pavilions themselves are works of great design innovation, made from sand. The pavilions will be integrated into the walkways of d3.
United by the theme Games: The Element of Play in Culture, the content of each is selected by a curator from each country, enabling the pavilions to act as windows into the local aesthetic and immersing visitors in different design worlds.
This exploration allows curators from each participating country including Kuwait, Jordan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and USE, to generate works that aim to deconstruct cultural prescriptions of a country and look to how a certain culture affects its people.
“We selected sand as the structure’s core material; a playful material in the way it moves, accumulates, shifts and the endless interactions we had with it growing up,” said Hamad Khoory, partner at Loci Architecture + Design, the firm behind the design of the ABWAB pavilions.
Integrated into the street of Design District, ABWAB, meaning ‘door’ in Arabic, acts as a portal into the regions’ local design talent interpretation of the overarching theme: Games, the element of play in culture.
An intriguing ABWAB feature is from Tunisia with their Pavilion 999. Curated by Chacha Atallah with designers Karim Ben Amor and Haythem Zakaria, 999 will see a three-dimensional puzzle requiring participants to create various shapes and forms. Another feature from Pakistan, Daalaan, sees visitors curiously transported into the past and present through an evocative use of materials and structures.
With a powerful program of events to bring together design from around the world, Dubai Design Week 2015 promises to confirm its status as one of the great emerging design cities of the world. Stay tuned as we present the latest from Dubai Design Week.
Dubai Design Week will run from Monday 26 October – Saturday 31 October 2015.
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