Frieze Abu Dhabi 2026

The Third Line is delighted to present a dynamic presentation of works by Anuar Khalifi, Bady Dalloul, Hassan Hajjaj, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, and Sarah Awad at the inaugural Frieze Abu Dhabi. Spanning painting, photography, collage, and sculpture, the booth brings together artists who take up the idea of the journey. Some journeys cross geographies. Others move between the real and the imagined, or reach back through layers of history and deep time.

Anuar Khalifi’s paintings depict individuals caught in a space where boundaries between reality and imagination blur. In Dreamigrant (there) (2026), a young man in a wetsuit sits on a folding chair in a domestic interior with a snorkel in hand and flippers on his feet. He is dressed for a sea that is nowhere in sight. In Dreamigrant (here) (2026), a shirtless figure stands on pools of red fabric, holding a crocodile rather triumphantly. Images drawn from art history haunt both paintings in the background. Khalifi’s scenes feel staged and dreamlike at once, inviting viewers to stitch together the different temporal layers and symbolic meanings into narratives of their own.

Bady Dalloul excavates (hi)stories of migration through collages of text and image. His small wooden boxes layer Japanese manga, film imagery, and handwritten notes into compact worlds where cultures, eras, and personal memories collide. In works such as Dimna’s Death (2016) and The Battle of the Lion-King and Shanzaba (2016), Dalloul returns to the animal fables of Kalila wa Dimna. He reworks the classical tales of power and intrigue through drawing and found ephemera, showing how stories migrate and change as they travel.

Hassan Hajjaj’s black-and-white portraits from the early 2000s capture people as they choose to be seen: playful, self-possessed, and in close company. In Untitled (E21B) (2000/1421), two figures pose against a whitewashed wall, as if caught in a dance. In Untitled (E14B) (2006/1427) , a group of women lie together on a patterned rug laid on equally tessellated tiles. Their bodies lean on and touch one another’s, hinting at the close relationship they share. The portraits record not only Hajjaj’s friends who populated his world as a young creative, but also a transnational milieu shaped by migration and return that cultivated a generation of artists.

Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige’s sculptures, Blow Up, magnify sediments of fine pebbles, pottery shards, and glass fragments unearthed from Murano. The double-sided sculptures reconstruct an archaeological scene on the one side, while presenting a microscopic view of the same scene at various magnifications on the other. By employing multiple vantage points and scale, the sculptures take viewers on a journey across deep time. Encased in lens-like forms of blown glass, the fragments become archives of the layered histories held beneath the ground. The works are part of the artists’ ongoing Unconformities series, a constellation of works that reveal histories embedded in the multiple layers of earth.

Sarah Awad’s painting extends the artist’s language of vivid hues, bold free-flowing forms, and confident brushstrokes. Drawing on Fauvism, Color Field abstraction, and Neo-Expressionism, Awad builds her compositions from saturated pinks and reds, cut through by passages of black, pale blue, and flashes of orange. Fragments of a body (a limb, a turning torso) seem to surface from these fields of color before dissolving back into them, leaving the work poised between abstraction and figuration. Color here is both subject and structure. It guides the eye across the canvas while unsettling any fixed point of reference, so the painting itself becomes a site of transformation where forms emerge, shift, and continually renegotiate their boundaries.

Together, the works propose the journey not simply as passage from one place to another, but as a condition that reshapes body, memory, and language.

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Kamran Samimi at Frieze Sculpture Abu Dhabi

Mamsha Beach, Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi, UAE

16 November – 16 December 2026

Kamran Samimi participates in Frieze Sculpture Abu Dhabi with Traveling Stones (2025), a pair of green basalt sculptures formed on the North American continent and shaped in rural Hawai’i. Their surfaces and forms arise from a collaboration between the artist’s hands and the primordial dreams of the Earth. Traces of fire, pressure, fracture, and erosion point to the histories the sculptures have accumulated over millions of years, and across the journey that brought them over land and sea. At the center of each stone is a circular void, a portal through which to contemplate the span of time it holds.

Frieze Sculpture Abu Dhabi brings the art fair into the public realm, unfolding as a journey across Mamsha Beach, Saadiyat Island, through form, material, and time.