The Abwab exhibition is Dubai Design Week’s key event for highlighting regional design talent from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia and is the only initiative of its of its kind in these regions. This year, an editorial board selected the works on display. Below we highlight design commentator, consultant, journalist, and author, Max Fraser’s favorites from this year’s submissions for the ABWAB exhibition.

The Abwab exhibition is Dubai Design Week’s key event for highlighting regional design talent from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia and is the only initiative of its of its kind in these regions. This year, an editorial board selected the works on display. Below we highlight design commentator, consultant, journalist, and author, Max Fraser’s favorites from this year’s submissions for the ABWAB exhibition:

1. Hicham Lahlou – Big Black One

Hicham Lahlou’s steel light piece shines light onto Moroccan music. Crafted with raw material, it is an intersection of nafar, or trumpets traditional to the Gnawa music of the region, paying tribute to music, his culture, and art.

2. Joy Srour – Lela

Joy Srour’s work tells a story through materials; her ‘Lela’ speaks of a character whose inner glow radiates from within as she journeys along rough roads between cities, denoted by the dark earthenware. The luminosity of the brass counterweights reflects her sense of balance as she upholds a strong connection to home. Lela is a light of vivid warmth, which speaks of how one’s inner magic can transcend beyond borders.

3. Earth&ware – The Oyster

A collaboration born out of a passion for creativity and natural materials, Earth&ware is founded by two architects who wished to create modern adaptations of items using natural resources and traditional methods. ‘The Oyster’ is a light fixture made from natural and recyclable materials that explores senses that highlight Emirati culture, while providing comfortable and ambient light.

4. Medi Khessouane – Black Tumour Chair

MKConcept, a Moroccan design agency, revolves its work around sustainable development and ecological awareness. This chair is a sarcastic statement on humanity’s great endeavors to build a ‘civilization’ whilst ignoring the price that the ecology is paying for his ‘intelligence’. Referencing oil spills, nuclear radiation, pollution and coral bleaching, it expresses how all these catastrophes stem from man’s desire to control everything whilst he can hardly control himself.

5. Studio A – The Charles Bar

Ahmad Bazazo is a Beirut based designer who creates timeless pieces which bridge the gap between old and new, through his multidisciplinary practice "Studio A". The practice focuses on challenging design norms, through material and conceptual experimentation, in order to create beautiful pieces which have an affect on the spaces that they encompass.

The ‘Charles Bar’ is a statement piece that transforms the act of making a drink into a quest of discovery. Beverages are kept in a taunting glass case accessible only via a top panel, and a secret compartment contained glasses is only revealed after a brass and marble element is slid open.

6. Hozan Zangana – Sufi

Born and raised in Kirkuk, northern Iraq, Hozan was always enchanted with the 7th century Kufic script and the history it spoke. Inspired by language, tradition, and rituals, elements that are intangible yet play a vital role in human culture, Hozan embodied the voluptuous curves and strands of the calligraphy in his sculptures. The ‘Sufi’ Vase with five folds and the silhouette of the wide dress, shaped by arms and shoulders, a well-known motif in Middle Eastern architecture, was inspired by the Sufi dance, embodying the mystical forms that enchanted Hozan. This is the second appearance Hozan makes in Abwab, having designed the Iraqi pavilion of Abwab last year.

7. Anjali Srinivasan – Quiver Vessels

With experience working with traditional Indian craft artisans, Anjali heads the only artist-run hot glass studio in Dubai. Her submission for Abwab, ‘Quiver Vessels’, questions the notion of a self-contained object and introduces the reflection of the viewer in her art. These vessels, which emphatically react to vibrations, collapse and return to shape with just a poke, a fold, and even a human breath.

8. Lujaine Rezk – AlManama

Lujaine Rezk, Dubai-based designer, has worked on projects that observe the natural creations of spontaneous and informal communities in public places as a means to reclaim and belong. This interest in space, place, community, and culture has become the heart of her work. ‘AlManama’, a light and stackable bench made from the most cost-effective materials that references the traditional benches of the Gulf, is an investigation on place making in the public realm.

9. Dima Srouji – Hollow Forms

Dima’s work is an effort to protect the glass-blowing industry, an age-old tradition in Palestine, from the volatile political condition and the fragile nature of glass. By using technology to traverse the gap between the tradition and cultural aesthetic of glass-blowing and reaching a global standard and reactivating the industry. ‘Hollow Forms,’ a collection blown in a village near Ramallah, was designed using digital tools but created using the ancient techniques.

10. Rasha Dakkak – The Prayer Mat: Reinterpreting Ritual Aesthetics

Traditional prayer mats are used five times a day, transforming any non-religious space into a sanctuary, introducing a break in space and time. The fact that prayer mats look like outdated objects helps create a distance between the new generation, the object, and what it represents. As they are unidirectional rather than symmetrical, the top end of the prayer mat includes lettering as a motif, inviting every Muslim to pray and inspiring contemplation by shifting across semiotic registers.

11. Michael Rice – Naked Raku Form

In his work, Rice uses research from his residency in Bali on the ‘Naked Raku’ process whereby a wheel-thrown form finished with white Terra Sigillata is fired to 1000degrees Celcius. Coated with a layer of slip and then glazed, it is fired for a second time, and when it is pulled from the hot kiln, the glaze shatters and the smoke penetrates, creating each distinctive pattern that is singular to each vessel.

12. Studio Meftah –Unité

Ilyas’ creations are a constant play between a volume combination with abstract concepts and an obsession to details and technical achievement. His cube-shaped Unité lamp takes 1500 hours to forge; fine openwork creates a metal lace sublimated by light, projecting shadows that expand beyond the borders of the object. With a dematerialized structure, it seems to move with the angle of contemplation, until it momentarily vanishes.

13. SAM Product Design – Bamboo Linea

This minimal, wall-mounted light is inspired by bamboo and consists of only two elements – the concave background and a compact cylinder in antiqued brass containing the light-source.

14. Loci Architecture & Design – Sr

Loci Architecture & Design is centered on the viewpoint that design inspiration and influence does not diffuse from the external to the internal, but organically stems from the geographic context of a region and its culture, tradition, and history. The focus of ‘Sr’ is the longstanding tradition of privacy in the Middle East. A semi-permeable membrane, enough to merely peer through to the other side, ‘Sr’ highlights the separation between public and private spheres. Consisting of desert sand within its multi-wall polycarbonate sheets, no two panels are identical. Sand’s unique physical properties ensure that each panel is completely unique.