NOMAD in Abu Dhabi: Terminal Reborn
In late November 2025, as Abu Dhabi’s cultural season reaches its annual crescendo across Saadiyat and beyond, an unexpected landmark prepares for a second life. Terminal 1 of Zayed International Airport—an emblem of Gulf modernism opened in 1982 and retired in 2023—will reopen its doors, not to passengers, but to ideas. Its circular halls, long accustomed to the rhythms of arrival and departure, will once again become a site of passage. This time, the movement is conceptual: NOMAD, the itinerant platform for collectible design and contemporary art, stages its most ambitious Middle Eastern edition within the dormant terminal.
NOMAD is less a fair than a phenomenon—a travelling, shape-shifting chamber of art and design that occupies places the way a story occupies a stage. Founded by Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte and Giorgio Pace, it arrives not with rows of booths but with a manifesto: that collectible design, contemporary art, and craft deserve settings that deepen meaning rather than dilute it. Each edition is an invitation-only encounter, staged within locations whose walls already hold their own histories—Alpine villas, Renaissance palazzos, modernist icons. Wherever it lands, NOMAD does not merely install; it inhabits.
In Abu Dhabi, this idea reaches its most cinematic form yet. Terminal 1—designed by Paul Andreu and crowned with its tent-like mosaic roof—was once the country’s opening gesture to the world: a curving glass monument to the ambition of a young nation envisioned by the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan. Today, decades after its final departures, NOMAD steps into the quieted terminal like a returning traveller, reawakening its geometry. The space becomes a kind of time-lapse architecture: past optimism, present creativity, and future possibility layered across its soaring shell.
This resonance is sharpened by Abu Dhabi’s growing cultural gravity. The Saadiyat Cultural District—with the Louvre now an anchor and the Guggenheim on the horizon—signals a city not merely hosting culture but generating it. By aligning with Abu Dhabi Art, NOMAD amplifies this momentum, drawing a caravan of collectors, curators, architects, and patrons who move seamlessly between continents and contexts.
And beyond Abu Dhabi, Dubai’s design ecosystem expands the regional constellation, positioning the UAE as a network of creative economies rather than a single destination. In this landscape, NOMAD becomes both gateway and gauge—introducing global galleries to the region while refining the Gulf’s own curatorial and market sensibilities. This edition assembles a near-cinematic cast of galleries, each contributing a fragment to a larger topography of material, memory, and form.
Nilufar (Milan) stages a dialogue between Gio Ponti’s refined modernism and the pulse of contemporary design. Gallery FUMI (London) creates a sensorial field of bronze, textiles, ceramics, and mirrored surfaces—objects that feel less displayed than suspended in conversation. Galerie BSL (Paris) foregrounds the tactility of Pia Maria Raeder’s sculptural forms and presents the Gandhara Carapace by Nada Debs and Studio Lél, where sensual materials meet spiritual geometry and inherited craft. Regional voices press the fair’s global arc into local ground. From Cairo, Don Tanani brings camel bone, oak, and oxidised brass shaped through the logic of Egyptian craft. Le LAB introduces Khaled Zaki’s Noah’s Arc, a sculptural meditation on coexistence and architectural memory. Gem Alf (Istanbul) refines Ottoman heritage into luminous contemporary form, while We Gallery folds Brazilian modernism—from Oscar Niemeyer’s curvilinear language to Lucas Recchia’s crystalline precision—into a dialogue with Gulf modernity.
Leila Heller Gallery extends the cinematic sweep with Chihuly: Four Decades of Iconic Works, where colour and molten movement flicker like captured fire. Together, these presentations trace a cultural atlas that spans Milan to Cairo, São Paulo to Sharjah, Tokyo to Tunis—intersecting inside a terminal once built for global transit, now repurposed for global thought.
Craft, Code, and the Contemporary Imagination
NOMAD’s special projects explore how the ancient, the algorithmic, and the artisanal can coexist within the same material breath. Irthi Contemporary Crafts Council (Sharjah) unveils Tilad, a collaboration with Mexican designer Ricardo Rendón, where Talli and Safeefah techniques entwine with volcanic stone and pine—a craft dialogue stretching across oceans yet rooted in memory.
Technology appears not as ornament but as co-author. A. A. Murakami and TRAME present A Thousand Layers of Stomach, where generative code spins intricate knitted forms derived from the internal mathematics of the Asari clam. Vagujhelyi’s Postura series reframes ritual through folded steel and bronze, while Super Loop’s Fluid Echoes transforms Middle Eastern floral motifs into reflective sculptural apparitions. Parsa (Paris/Tehran) compresses geological time into travertine and onyx, offering objects that feel both ancient and futuristic.
A major narrative crescendo unfolds at the DEPARTURES platform—powered by Etihad Airways—where the terminal’s former heart becomes the stage for monumental interventions. Orkhan Mammadov reimagines Etihad’s 2026 destinations through an AI lens, merging digital heritage with speculative architecture. Works by Zeinab Al Hashemi, Taher Asad-Bakhtiari, Ahmad Angawi, and others expand this into a multi-layered meditation on identity, mobility, and how cultures circulate in the contemporary imagination.
Bottega Veneta’s Destinations marks fifty years of Intrecciato with a radiant gesture: eight designers from across the Middle East and North Africa reinterpreting the house’s heritage through their own cultural vocabularies. Maison Perrier-Jouët’s presentation of Formafantasma’s Cohabitare brings ecological sculpture into the terminal—a quiet insistence on coexistence, biodiversity, and the long rhythms of natural material.
Off-site, Shifting Terrains at Jumeirah Saadiyat Island traces the evolving language of UAE design, spanning experimental concrete, contemporary ceramics, and new material research by Datecrete, Mary-Lynn Massoud, Georges Mohasseb, KAMEH, and others.
A new chapter for a historic terminal
What defines this edition of NOMAD is its intimacy with place. Terminal 1 is not a venue; it is a protagonist. Its circular lounges, arched walkways, and tiled exoskeleton shape the curatorial rhythm. Sculptural seating mirrors its curves; woven metal tapestries echo its shell; terracotta installations resonate with its desert-rooted palette. The outcome is not simply an exhibition but a reactivation—of a building paused in time, of a modernist chapter in Gulf history, and of a mode of cultural exchange that once defined the nation’s earliest decades. NOMAD Abu Dhabi becomes both an inauguration and a return: a return to architecture as narrative, to craft as emotional gravitas, and to travel understood not as movement but as imagination. In a region continually redrawing global cultural lines, NOMAD’s arrival feels less like an event and more like a cinematic dialogue—between heritage and futurity, stillness and motion, structure and possibility.
In this airport without flights, the world gathers once more—not to depart, but to envision new ways of seeing.