NOMAD will return to Abu Dhabi from 18 to 22 November 2026, bringing its travelling approach to collectible design back to Terminal 1 at the Old Abu Dhabi Airport. Following its first Abu Dhabi edition in 2025, the fair is expanding its mix of international galleries, regional initiatives, institutional collaborations and works conceived specifically for the site.
The choice of venue remains fundamental to the event’s identity. Terminal 1, associated with French architect Paul Andreu and the modernisation of international airport architecture in the second half of the twentieth century, gives NOMAD something a conventional exhibition hall cannot: a building with its own history, geometry and cultural memory. Rather than treating architecture as a neutral backdrop, the fair positions the former airport as part of the encounter between objects, makers and visitors.
That approach is consistent with NOMAD’s wider model. Since its launch in 2017, the itinerant showcase has presented collectible design in distinctive architectural settings rather than establishing a single permanent fairground. Its editions have connected contemporary design, art, architecture and collecting while changing location and context — an idea particularly resonant in Abu Dhabi, where cultural institutions, heritage initiatives and contemporary creative practices increasingly overlap.
For 2026, the exhibitor list combines returning names with galleries making their NOMAD Abu Dhabi debut. Nilufar of Milan, Galerie Gastou and Galerie BSL of Paris, Gallery FUMI of London and Le Lab Cairo are set to return. New participants announced for this edition include Carpenters Workshop Gallery, Mumbai-based ÆQUŌ, Galerie Negropontes, JCRD, Warsaw’s Craftica Gallery, Beirut-based PIK’D, Maison Intègre from Ouagadougou and Seoul’s Vein, among others.
The international roster is balanced by a stronger focus on practices and organisations connected to the UAE and the wider region. AWL, a new design gallery from Al Ain, joins House of Artisans and Irthi, alongside The AP Room, SUPERLOOP and a presentation by Iwan Maktabi + Don Tanani. Together, these participants place material knowledge, craft traditions and contemporary experimentation closer to the centre of the fair’s narrative.
One of the edition’s most significant institutional projects is a new annual initiative between Paris’s Institut du Monde Arabe and Abu Dhabi’s House of Artisans. Conceived as a platform for exchange between contemporary design and Emirati craftsmanship, the collaboration will begin at NOMAD Abu Dhabi 2026 with a commission by Abdel Al Tayeb, recipient of the 2026 IMA Design Award. Working with Emirati master artisans, Al Tayeb is developing a large-scale, site-specific installation for Terminal 1.
The collaboration is especially relevant to Abu Dhabi’s broader emphasis on safeguarding and reinterpreting craft knowledge. House of Artisans, located within the Al Hosn cultural site, is dedicated to the UAE’s traditional crafts and the skills embedded in them. By bringing those practices into dialogue with an international designer and a contemporary collectible-design audience, the NOMAD commission proposes craft not as a static inheritance, but as a living field capable of producing new forms.
NOMAD Abu Dhabi is presented during one of the capital’s busiest periods for art and design and is held in partnership with the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi. Its timing places collectible design within a wider cultural itinerary rather than isolating it as a specialist market event.
That context may ultimately be the most distinctive aspect of NOMAD’s Abu Dhabi proposition. The fair brings commercially represented design into conversation with architecture, institutional programming and local making traditions. Terminal 1 — once a point of arrival and departure — becomes an apt setting for a format built around movement and exchange.
NOMAD Abu Dhabi 2026 takes place from 18 to 22 November 2026 at Terminal 1, Old Abu Dhabi Airport, Abu Dhabi, UAE.
