Art Dubai Group has made two significant additions to its leadership team. In March Dunja Gottweis (above right), former Global Head of Gallery Relations at Art Basel, will become the Director of Art Dubai Fair, taking over for the 2026 edition; and Alexie Glass-Kantor (above left), formerly Executive Director of Artspace in Sydney, will take on the new role of Executive Director, Curatorial from April 2025.
They will join Benedetta Ghione and Pablo del Val in leading the art fair.
Ben Floyd, co-founder and CEO of the Art Dubai Group, described the appointments as “a game-changer for the company” as it looks to “grow our mandate” (which sounds like international expansion to us). He also emphasised unity in the boardroom: “I am confident their respective skills and experience will complement Benedetta and Pablo’s, and that together they can continue to build on the growth that has marked our last decade”.
Both appointments are definitely statements of intent, featuring heavyweights with great experience and excellent connections. The new fair director Dunja Gottweis had been at Art Basel since 2012; last year she had been promoted to a new role as Global Head of Gallery Relations, responsible for managing engagement with all the galleries who take part in Art Basel’s four fairs worldwide – indeed, she was instrumental in the successful launch of Art Basels Hong Kong and Paris.
She clearly brings extensive knowledge of what galleries want from art fairs, as well as which galleries would benefit from attending Art Dubai. More important, perhaps, she will bring strategic experience in honing and/or diversifying the fair’s profile.
Alexie Glass-Kantor has curated across independent spaces, museums, biennials, and festivals since 2000. She comes from a long stint at Artspace, Sydney, where she oversaw the transformation of the institution into a state-of-the-art contemporary art centre with expanded exhibition spaces and a much increased programme of exhibitions, residencies, research, and international collaborations – with, among others, Dhaka Art Summit, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and Seoul Museum of Art. In her own right she curated Marco Fusinato’s DESASTRES for the Australian Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale; and she for ten years to 2025 she curated Encounters, the large-scale installation sector at Art Basel Hong Kong.
Last August Glass-Kantor announced her departure from both Artspace and her role at Art Basel Hong Kong. At the time she said she was looking for new challenges: “I have really learned a lot from both of those [Artspace and Art Basel Hong Kong] and after 10 years, I realise it’s time for a new generation to curate Encounters, a new generation to lead Artspace. It’s time for me to take the things I’ve learned to lead different in different contexts”.
Her remit will include growing partnerships and institution building across all of Art Dubai Group’s art activity – so that will include the art fair but also the company’s partnerships and initiatives with business and government. So we can expect to see her working on local and especially international collaborations (“local artistic programming and global exchanges” as the press release has it); and there will surely be the kind of year-round initiatives that expand the brand beyond the narrow week-long art fair focus.
And if we’re looking for what kind of exhibition-making she might develop at Art Dubai, there might be some clues in her Artspace experience. Glass-Kantor clearly views the curator’s role as extending beyond traditional exhibition-making to include alternatives to conventional exhibition-making and engagement with broader social concerns; at Artspace she incorporate public programmes, performance lectures, and other curatorial practices like the ‘Ideas Platform’, a space for short-term quick-response projects that allowed for more risk-taking.
These are new job titles as well as new appointments, working alongside the existing duopoly of Benedetta Ghione and Pablo del Val. They both took up their positions more or less at the same time in 2015; since then they have worked well together to shape Art Dubai into the regionally and internationally significant art fair that it has become – increasing the number of locally represented artists and adding the ‘Global South’ remit, and adding or expanding initiatives like the A.R.M. Holdings Children’s Programme, Art Dubai Digital, and Campus Art Dubai.
Ghione remains Executive Director, a position which gave her responsibility for the strategic direction and delivery of the fair (‘Fair Director’ might have been a more accurate job title. With the arrival of Dunja Gottweis she’ll now be able to step back from the day-to-day grind to concentrate more on new business strategy and corporate partnerships.
Pablo del Val, the current Artistic Director of Art Dubai, will also be shifting from the nitty-gritty of overseeing the fair’s artistic direction to a new role focusing on creating international opportunities for the company. It’s not entirely clear what this means in practice – joint projects outside the UAE? International art prizes like the Jameel? Touring shows? Or satellite versions of Art Dubai? – but clearly it marls a strategic change; Art Dubai as a group has hitherto been focussed on year-round investment in Dubai, focussing on design and art with much involvement with Dubai Culture for projects such as the Dubai Collection and the Dubai Public Art initiative.
It might be significant that both new appointments have an Art Basel connection, given that there are persistent rumours of an Art Basel involvement in (or possible takeover of) Abu Dhabi Art. Having some in-house experience of how Art Basel works might well help in meeting competition from the capital. There again, it’s pretty hard to go headhunting top-quality art fair professionals without checking out the staff lists of the world’s biggest professional art fair business …
This year’s Art Dubai takes place as usual at Madinat Jumeirah, running from 18 to 20 April with invitation-only previews on 16 and 17 April.
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