Abwab, meaning 'doors' in Arabic, is a programme that supports practitioners from across West, South, Southeast and East Asia, as well as the African continent, through the commissioning of pavilions that are thematically remodelled each year to reflect timely global and regional contexts.

To date, over 180 designers from across the region have participated in Abwab, representing a range of countries including Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, India, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and the UAE.

2026 Theme

In Other Words begins with a simple proposition: every act of communication involves a decision. Bringing together five practices, Abwab considers what is made visible, what remains unspoken, what is translated, and how meaning is carried through material, form, gesture, image and the spaces we move through.

2026 Commissions

Bringing together five practices, Abwab looks beyond speech and writing to the visual, material and spatial systems through which knowledge, memory and meaning are produced and exchanged.

VARUSSI | Taleem

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For VARUSSI, Taleem begins with the coded system of notation used in Kashmiri carpet and Kani shawl making, where instructions pass between designer and weaver through an established language of making. Translated into architecture, the pavilion asks what happens when an inherited system of knowledge becomes something audiences can physically enter, inhabit and experience.

Kanaka Raghavan | Cheent Devanagari

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Kanaka Raghavan’s Cheent Devanagari reconsiders Devanagari typography through the script’s own structural logic and the material processes of block printing, challenging design frameworks that position Latin typography as a universal default. Translucent textile layers allow the letterform to separate and recompose as audiences move around it.

Grace Shieh | A Library of Paper Memories

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Grace Shieh’s A Library of Paper Memories approaches handmade paper as a language in its own right. Working through papermaking, poetry and experimental writing, she considers how fibre, texture and form can hold memory, and how reading might extend beyond the conventional page.

Dalia Rafeh | Shhhhhhhh

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Dalia Rafeh’s Shhhhhhhh takes the Arabic ش and its familiar call for quiet and extends it into a sustained line of red light. Borrowing from the visual language of public and commercial signage, the work makes silence emphatically visible, allowing a familiar gesture to move between command, pause, reflection and listening.

UBIK | Non/Sense

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Across the atrium floor, UBIK’s Non/Sense begins with science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later. Fragments of text pass through translation, mistranslation, abbreviation and Lorem Ipsum, gradually shifting from language into image, rhythm and spatial structure.