One thing is for certain: Dubai Design Week will be anything but boring. A plethora events, installations, and conferences will animate the trade show, many of which will be held in the Dubai Design District. D3 seeks to position itself as the driving district for design, art, and culture. Among the events worth noting are Le French Design, From Rak to Drak, The Original Comes From Vitra, UAE Design Stories, and Design + Making UAE.
As part of the French-UAE Cultural Dialogue, the Institut Français in the United Arab Emirates is taking part at design week with an exhibition dedicated to French design, curated by Maud Louvrier-Clerc. The “Le French Design, How Innovation creates history” exhibition aims to redefine the scope of French design and to show how it incorporates design, art and lifestyle at the same time. The exhibition also features works by 14 designers from the ‘Collectif Made in France en Transparence’.
The spotlight is on the Ras Al Khor community and on the complexity of its everyday life, through an exhibition staged by DRAK, a collective design platform founded in Dubai in 2015. The three founders – Khalid Shafar, Khulood Thani and Nadine Kanso – have transformed three stores in the area (a bakery, barbershop and calligraphy and advertising store) into case studies for designing contemporary objects to use in these settings. The research project was followed and captured by photographer Ola Allouz, who also created a film project that is part of the exhibition at d3.
The road show promoted by Vitra is also coming to Dubai, bringing its most iconic pieces to the global stage. Every stand that makes up the exhibition tells the story of a different product through drawings, sketches and photographs of the prototypes. Naturally, the exhibition features the Panton chair, the Standard chair by Jean Prouve and the Lounge Chair by Charles and Ray Eames.
Milan, London, Paris and back to Dubai. The exhibition ‘UAE Design Stories: The Next Generation from The Emirates’ is returning to its origins, after travelling to various International Design Weeks. Supported by the UAE Ministry of Culture and Knowledge Development and curated by the product designer Khalid Shafar, the exhibition focuses attention on ten designers from the Emirates who immersed themselves in the UAE’s photographic archives in order to reinterpret their roots in new pieces with a contemporary flavour.
Tashkeel presents Design + Making UAE, the perfect destination for emerging designers, professionals and anyone interested in the local design ecosystem. The platform encompasses the Tanween Design Programme, Tanween Collection and Make Works UAE, as well as a pop-up store with affordable products by UAE creatives, panel talks and workshops with the organization’s creative partners, the Khatt Foundation and Dubai Network for Art, Architecture & Technology.
