Currently the Middle East's only fair dedicated to museum-quality design, Design Days Dubai has come to be associated with great expectations. From its new home at Dubai Design District, this sixth edition managed to raise the benchmark, gathering fifty leading international galleries from thirty-nine countries beneath an underscoring spirit of diversity and inclusion.
Design expert and Wallpaper editor-at-large Suzanne Trocmé, who has spent several years nurturing Arab design talent, turned the tables this year by bringing ten celebrated British designers to the fair for a 'Britain Takes Shape' exhibition. Highlighting the importance of collaboration and migration within the global creative community, the showcase sent a pointed message in a nationalistic, post-Brexit world. Brodie Neill's handmade E-turn bench exemplified his sinuous, sculptural aesthetic, while award-winning Bethan Gray presented her Shamsian Collection, born of a collaboration with Iranian artist Mohamad Reza Shamsian and made using the traditional techniques of marquetry, khatam and damascene inlay.
The Crafts Council UK returned for a fifth time with eleven high-calibre British makers, among them Anita Carnell, who hand-stitches gilt thread onto leather, and Shauna Richardson, who brought a 3.2-metre-high 'crochetdermy' animal sculpture. Fulfilling Dubai's ambition to be perceived as an international hub, revered galleries such as New York's Todd Merrill Studio showed one-of-a-kind works by Molly Hatch, Niamh Barry and Jake Phipps, while Paris-based Territoire(s), in partnership with Maison Parisienne, marked its pavilion with Geraldine Gonzales's Flying Chair, a luminous suspended work that set a record for the highest number of Swarovski crystals used in such a piece.
Underlining the growing might of the region's creative community, Middle Eastern designers and curators comprised more than half of the galleries on show. Nakkash Gallery, once the fair's only locally based exhibitor, saw father-and-son owners Wajih and Omar Nakkash present their own collection for the first time. Amman's Naqsh Collective, founded by sisters Nisreen and Nermeen Abudail, debuted the acclaimed Wihdeh Collection, which draws on Levantine embroidery to seek a sense of community in each cluster of stitches. There were also colourful new works from Lebanon's Vick Vanlian, a contemporary take on majlis seating from Qatari designer Aisha Al Sowaidi, and Ayah Al Bitar's storage piece The Sanctuary, conceived to facilitate prayer and meditative ritual.
With a record twenty designers from the UAE, local talent was everywhere. Emirati designer Aljoud Lootah unveiled Tebr, her first ceramic collection, alongside hand-knotted carpets from Dubai-based Carpets CC and organic works by Irish artist and academic Michael Rice. One of the most discussed pieces came from the studio Apical Reform, whose Sonuslexica installation used parametric design and sound-wave technology to evoke a floating iceberg. Visitors were invited to record the words 'Peace, Growth and Harmony' in their native languages, the extracted sound waves then manifested digitally as wooden totems that formed the base of the work, akin to a stylised version of the Dubai skyline.
