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 Open Call: In Other Words

This year, Abwab evolves into a curated group exhibition, bringing together multiple participants and contributors. Rather than individual pavilions, this edition presents a shared spatial indoor environment, where individual works come together to form a collective exploration of language through design.​

Every act of communication involves a design decision: what is made visible, what is translated, how meaning is shaped, carried and understood.​

Across public and private space, language takes form in signage, interfaces and the built environment, as well as in gestures, oral histories and forms of address that persist across time and place. It exists in constant negotiation, shaped by migration, translation and exchange, shifting between clarity and ambiguity as it is adapted and reassembled across symbols, scripts and systems.​

In Other Words reframes language as lived experience. It asks how meaning is spoken, remembered, translated and sometimes misread, and how these processes can be expressed through design across visual, spatial and sonic forms.​

Designers and practitioners working across disciplines including graphic design, typography, architecture, spatial practice, writing, research, sound, performance, publishing and digital media are invited to respond to these ideas.​

Applications are now closed for Abwab 2026. For enquiries, please contact [email protected].