ArtDayME: Focus , Frieze’s longstanding section dedicated to younger international galleries, comes to Frieze Abu Dhabi for the fair’s inaugural edition, taking place from 19–22 November at Manarat Al Saadiyat.

The premise of the curated section is in its name: an invitation to focus on a new generation of artists and galleries, the mediums they are working with and the conditions and ideas shaping their practices. Artists presenting in this year’s Focus section explore vital themes of colonialism, migration, land and memory, through a range of experimental mediums – from Tahir Karmali's immersive textile installation to Thuy Tien Nguyen's automated music-box works and Jawad Al Malhi’s painted scenes.

In support of the next generation of artists and galleries, Frieze Abu Dhabi provides participating Focus galleries with bursaries.

Marigold Santos (Patel Brown)

Marigold Santos. shroud visage (jade vine blooms), 2026.

Filipino-Canadian artist Marigold Santos’s practice reflects on themes of visibility and invisibility, inspired by Filipino history, folklore and identity. Working across ink, paint, textiles and sculpture, the presentation is also a testament to mothering as both subject and method, shaped by the artist’s own experience. Highlights include a large-scale wall vinyl, layered with ink drawings depicting shrouded dancers and references to tabi-tabi po, a Filipino expression used to acknowledge unseen presences.

Tahir Karmali (Management)

Tahir Karmali, Unit 02, 2026. Image courtesy of the artist and Management, New York. Photo by Inna Svyatsky/installshots.art

Kenyan-born, New York-based artist Tahir Karmali creates material symbols that point to underlying systems of migration, belonging, labour and precarity. For Focus Karmali will transform the booth into a construction site, stretching green skrim across the walls evokes a building under construction, combined with textile limb-like forms. Bodily and architectural forms collide, creating an environment that is simultaneously physical, psychological and unstable. Drawing on his personal experience, Karmali’s work reflects on the messy reality of migration, the contradictions of belonging and feelings of anxiety in the face of precarity.

Dala Nasser (Commonwealth and Council)

Dala Nasser, Karak Nuh (Noah's fort) VI, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Through painting and architectural installations, Lebanese artist Dala Nasser , recipient of the inaugural Frieze Abu Dhabi Artist Award, explores historical sites steeped in mythology, displaced or lost through colonial extraction and war. Nasser works with rubbings – ash and natural pigment transferred onto muslin and cotton – as records of ruins, tombs and rock surfaces across Western Asia. In this way, Nasser rethinks material not only as form, but as a witness to historical conditions and events. Her presentation for Focus brings together two works from ‘Innocents at Home’, Nasser's first exhibition with Commonwealth and Council , alongside additional pieces drawn from sites the artist has returned to throughout her practice. Together, the works trace distinct places bound by shared questions of belonging, memory and myth.

Thuy Tien Nguyen (Solo)

Thuy Tien Nguyen is an artist based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany and Hanoi, Vietnam. Nguyen's artistic practice revolves around the transformation of personal and collective memories, examining how they are distorted, translated and reconstructed over time. Her new project for Focus features automated music-box works that reference furnishings from the Republic of Vietnam’s Independence Palace and the aesthetics of contemporary corporate interiors.

Jawad Al Malhi (Iyad Qanazea Gallery)

Jawad Al Malhi, The Caves of the Forgotten I, 2023

Based in Abu Dhabi and East Jerusalem, the artist Jawad Al Malhi positions the landscape as a living archive where histories accumulate and new forms of resilience take shape. From Palestinian scenes to the Gulf desert, Al Malhi paints environments in states of transformation with quiet, documentary precision, to examine questions of memory and site. Featured works for Focus include the Memories of Future , a series of paintings that observe construction sites on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island and Caves of the Forgotten , which explore what is buried within the Palestinian landscape. Together these works speak to a world where questions of land, belonging and ecological stewardship have never been more urgent.

Chonon Bensho (W-galería)

Chonon Bensho. Jone Metsa Noma (The beautiful woman of the invisible jungle), 2022.

Chonon Bensho is a Shipibo-Konibo artist whose practice is deeply rooted in the knowledge systems, cosmology and visual language of her community in the Peruvian Amazon. Rather than representing the Amazon as an external landscape, Bensho draws on the forest as an interconnected space, where human, vegetal, animal and spiritual worlds coexist, creating its own living system of knowledge. Her paintings and drawings translate this understanding into intricate visual compositions populated by forms, patterns and figures associated with Shipibo-Konibo ideas and ancestral practices. In these ways, Bensho’s presentation for Focus will be an immersive environment that asserts the vitality of contemporary Indigenous visual languages.