Guest Curator: Ghassan Salameh

Designer Ghassan Salameh has been announced as Guest Curator for this year’s edition of Dubai Design Week.

In 2014, Salameh founded his own design studio practice in Beirut, Lebanon, known as Ghassan Salameh Studio, which focuses on lighting-centric installations and bespoke lighting design products. An experimental and research-led design studio, its lighting collections and site-specific installations have exhibited across the Middle East and internationally, including at design festivals in Venice, Milan, London, and Berlin.

The principle which underpins Ghassan’s work is the notion of using design as an agent of positive change. Last year, he organized and curated Beirut Design Week 2018 with a central thematic focusing on the role of Design in making the City a more livable and socially just space and was the chief advisor on the FANTASMEEM one-year training program aimed at providing entrepreneurship support for design startups as well as offer financial grants.

For this year’s Dubai Design Week, Ghassan will be curating two exhibitions within Downtown Editions; “MADAR” will shed light on the current state of regional design and the emerging movements from design-active cities in the region, while “INSIGHT/ONSITE” will boost new works and creations of regionally based design entrepreneurs.

Ghassan said: “The thematics of empowering local and regional design have been at the center of my research and practice for the past few years, and I’m looking forward to expanding on this in my new role as Guest Curator of Dubai Design Week 2019. I’m also a firm believer in collaboration and know that many cultural producers in the region have put much effort into activating change through their communities. It is these efforts that I’ll be spotlighting.”