NOMAD Abu Dhabi Turns a Decommissioned Airport Terminal into a Destination for Design

<img decoding="async" class="size-full-width wp-image-1601248" src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/11/Terminal-1_Zayed-International-Airport-Venue_Photo-Credit-Nikita-Berezhnoy_Courtesy-of-NOMAD-Circle-7.jpg?quality=80&w=970″ alt=”A staircase and escalator descend into an exhibition area marked with red signs reading “NOMAD Vault.” Above, a mosaic ceiling with green, white and blue honeycomb shapes fans out over the space.” width=”970″ height=”647″ data-caption=’A view of the entrance to NOMAD’s inaugural edition in Abu Dhabi at Zayed International Airport Terminal 1. <span class=”media-credit”>Photo: Nikita Berezhnoy | Courtesy of NOMAD Circle</span>’>

By now, art lovers have grown accustomed to boutique fairs staged in hotel suites, and with the U-Haul art fair, we have even seen galleries exhibiting inside vans and parking lots. NOMAD, however, has pushed the experiment further. For the first time, an art and design fair has landed inside an airport, taking over the decommissioned Terminal 1 of Zayed International Airport for its inaugural Abu Dhabi edition. The atmosphere was entirely on theme and uncannily apt—almost too familiar for the globetrotting profile of much of the art world. Visitors entered with boarding pass-style cards handed out at a check-in counter staffed by hostesses, before navigating reactivated terminals and lounge-style dining areas, all produced in partnership with Etihad Airways.

Inside, fairgoers moved through a sequence of spaces where curated conversations between art and design unfolded. These opened into small alcoves, each with its own narrative, material experimentation and curatorial rhythm, building a cohesive sense of rigor that elevated the experience.

Local and international galleries used the airport’s strange neutrality and its sense of suspended time and space to their advantage. Among the first exhibitors visitors encountered at the entrance was The Third Line, a leading UAE gallery presenting a series of more accessible limited-edition prints by artists from the region. The gallery’s strong roster of internationally recognized artists tied to the region was placed in dialogue with local designers and creators through The Third Line Shop. According to the gallery’s co-founder, Sunny Rahbar, the presentation engages with materiality, process, geometric abstraction and cross-cultural exchange—from Ala Ebtekar’s celestial paintings to Kamran Samimi’s stone sculptures and vibrant prints by Amir H. Fallah. “The setting of the old Abu Dhabi airport beautifully amplifies these works,” he tells Observer.

Another local gallery, Leila Heller, presented pioneering artist-designer Dale Chihuly, whose glass environments have redefined the language of contemporary studio glass. At NOMAD, his experimental approach to Murano-blown glass materialized in voluminous, color-saturated forms reminiscent of flowers and marine corals. The combination of technical mastery, sculptural imagination and an institutionally validated career—his works already reside in major collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum—explains the substantial pricing: individual pieces offered at $55,000-60,000 and larger installations reaching $300,000.

As is usual at NOMAD, many presentations fluidly combined art and collectible design in harmonies of narrative and form. In Abu Dhabi, this was immediately evident in the three-way collaboration between Olivier Varenne Art Moderne et Contemporain from Geneva, Adam Knight Fine Art and Tasmanian-born designer Brodie Neill. Chiharu Shiota’s quiet, memorial poetry of materials, traces and emotional threads was paired with the painterly, dotted cosmologies grounded in the earthy connection to land found in the work of Aboriginal artist Clifford Possum Tjapaltjiarri, both united by an attitude toward materials as vessels of memory—a sensibility they share with Neill, known for transforming reclaimed and waste materials into refined sculptural yet functional objects. Made from plastic waste recovered from the ocean and inspired by maritime maps, Neill’s Gyro table—first shown at the London Design Biennale—charts a geometric pattern that echoes the terminal’s ceiling grid. Priced around $90,000-120,000, his creations echoed the same preoccupation shared by the other two artists with materiality as a physical and emotional record of human presence, agency and responsibility on this planet—a point where human forms and ecology meet.

In the niches that once served as waiting areas, several individual creators, designers and artists introduced more intimate propositions that deepened the fair’s reflection on the interconnection between material, memory and the psychology of transit, through objects conceived as both emotional and functional devices.

One of the most strikingly original design lexicons in this edition comes from Vagujheli by Diego Villarreal Vagujheli, a young Spanish designer based in New York who at NOMAD debuts his first collection “POSTURA.” His organically patinated bronze objects carry traces of his work with his mother in post-disaster relief in Puerto Rico, evoking in their fluid, tactile shapes the malleability of mud—hovering between collapse, temporary infrastructures of care and the possibility of reshaping. His emotionally and ergonomically attuned editioned objects, all priced under $25,000, feel suspended between erosion and rebirth, balancing sculptural tactility with ergonomic logic and discipline. The first design piece he ever created—an ergonomic weight perched on a sculptural base—became a seed for an entire language, he explains. The object’s physical characteristics encourage and direct a posture, a behavior and a precise interaction already embedded in the form.

From the region, Egypt’s Don Tatani added a quietly compelling chapter with beautifully produced Cairo-made design, while the young U.A.E. collective Super Loop showed Fluid Echoes, a series of fluidly and curvilinearly carved wooden pieces—editioned but unrepeatable due to the grain and the hand, yet still within an accessible price range of $4,000-13,000.

On the Italian side, Robilant+Voena paired Italian masters—including a Pistoletto mirror and Boetti’s embroidered map—with Italian design in a presentation that landed with unmistakable confidence and elegance, embodying the “made in Italy” ethos. Also from Milan, Nilufar staged one of the fair’s most scenographic interventions: flora-inspired Murano glass sculptural lamps by Christian Pellizzari illuminated the corridor leading to a chamber where vintage gems by Gio Ponti met cross-cultural and contemporary design, including creations by Etereo, Gal Galon, Shlomo Harush, Allegra Hicks, Maximilian Marchesani, Claude Missir, Odd Matter, Osanna Visconti, StudioDanielK and the nature-inspired work of Indian designer Vicram Goyal.

Another nearby passage opened into a red-draped space where masterworks by Wayne Thiebaud, Lucio Fontana and Yoshitomo Nara hovered like apparitions in front of vitrines filled with precious gems and designer jewelry.

NOMAD also presented more concept-based multidimensional interventions on the psychology of transit. Antidote’s In Transit, an immersive video installation, offered an oasis of pause and meditative introspection. Glitching departure screens, terminal seating and travel paraphernalia looped as a mantra, creating a quiet invitation to internal check-in. Commissioned by the spatial design studio creatorandcurator, the project aligns with Antidote’s broader wellness concept. A functional bar accompanied the presentation, serving healthy energy drinks built on adaptogens, nootropics and botanicals as an alcohol and sugar free bar for the airport and the art fairs of the future.

Inspired by the rhythms of airports and the language of relentless movement shared with today’s global art world jet set, the intervention transformed the terminal into an immersive bar-meets-art installation augmented with scientific elements. Its menu included blends like Fix Me, Cure Me, Calm Me and Boost Me, each powered by botanicals, adaptogens and Cymbiotika-sourced supplements to support mind-body balance.

Also presented at the fair was Formafantasma’s “Cohabitare,” developed with Perrier-Jouët, which extended the meditation on our entanglement with materials and environments. The fair largely leaned toward a new generation of designers expanding the lexicon of form, blending functionality, craftsmanship and narrative into pieces that read as full-fledged works of art. Still, a few gems from the past appeared as well, such as Oscar Niemeyer’s elegant chaise longue at We Gallery’s booth, where icons of Brazilian modernism met the country’s most compelling contemporary creators. Among them were Lucas Recchia’s innovative material experiments and Domingos Tótora’s tactile, earth-inspired sculptural pieces made from recycled cardboard pulp.

After 15 editions across Capri, St. Moritz, Monaco and Venice, NOMAD arrives in Abu Dhabi not as an import but as a resonance. The region’s cultural vocabulary is steeped in movement—nomadism, transit and thresholds—and the airport setting gives that heritage a literal architecture. Established in 2017 by Canadian Italian architect Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte as a traveling showcase for contemporary art and collectible design, NOMAD has always thrived on combining radical dislocation with elegant curation, slipping collectible design into villas in Capri, palazzos in Venice and chalets in St. Moritz. With this Abu Dhabi iteration, the fair introduced its distinctive format and curatorial rigor to the Middle East, finding resonance in both its name and its site—nomadic movement, transience and the state of being in transit, all central to the region’s cultural fabric.

As Abu Dhabi Art transitions into Frieze Abu Dhabi next year, the boutique event may be the region’s sole fair dedicated to collectible design, bridging local craftsmanship with international expertise and providing a space for discovery, innovation and new relationships between form, craft and functionality. “What fascinates me about presenting NOMAD inside Terminal 1 is that the airport stops being a place of transit and becomes, for a moment, a destination in itself,” Bellavance-Lecompte tells Observer, noting how visitors are now able to reappropriate a building, one of those “non-place” architectures of transit, that many might have passed through for more than four decades yet rarely had the chance to truly see. “By filling this iconic modernist terminal with collectible design and art, the entire experience shifts: people look differently at the architecture, at the light, at the scale of the space. The fair allows them to rediscover a familiar landmark with new eyes, transforming the act of ‘passing through’ into an act of contemplation.”

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