Ras Al Khaimah: The 14th Ras Al Khaimah Art Festival opened in 16th January 2026 with a powerful statement: contemporary art does not need skyscrapers to speak globally. Set within the evocative surroundings of Al Jazeera Al Hamra Heritage Village, the festival transformed one of the UAE’s best-preserved coastal settlements into a living, breathing cultural landscape, where memory, history, and artistic imagination converge.
Inaugurated by HH Sheikh Saud bin Saqr Al Qasimi, Supreme Council Member and Ruler of Ras Al Khaimah, the festival reaffirmed the emirate’s growing commitment to culture as a pillar of community development and creative economy. His engagement with participating artists during the opening underscored a broader vision, one where heritage is not preserved in isolation, but activated through dialogue, experimentation, and international exchange.
A Global Dialogue Rooted in Local History
Held under the theme “Civilisations,” RAK Art Festival 2026 brought together more than 100 artists from 49 countries, making it one of the most internationally diverse cultural gatherings in the northern emirates. The theme resonated deeply with the site itself: a former pearling village layered with stories of trade, migration, resilience, and coexistence.
Rather than functioning as a neutral exhibition venue, Al Jazeera Al Hamra became an active collaborator. Coral-stone houses, courtyards, rooftops, sandy pathways, and sea-facing walls framed artworks that explored memory, identity, environment, ritual, technology, and the shifting meanings of civilisation in a globalised world.
Curatorial Vision: Memory as Material
The festival’s main exhibition, Civilisations, was curated by Alfio Tommasini, whose practice as a photographer and visual archivist shaped the exhibition’s reflective tone. His curatorial approach treated images, objects, and installations as vessels of memory, anchoring personal and collective histories within the architecture of the village itself. Here, artworks did not simply reference the past; they engaged with it physically. Walls carried stories, rooms held emotions, and open courtyards became spaces of encounter where visitors moved through time as much as through space. The village functioned as a living memory device, blurring boundaries between archive and experience.
A New Chapter: Ras Al Khaimah Contemporary Art Biennale
Marking a significant evolution in the festival’s trajectory was the launch of the Ras Al Khaimah Contemporary Art Biennale, curated by Sharon Toval. Positioned alongside the main exhibition, the biennale introduced a more experimental and critical layer, focusing on practices that reinterpret heritage through textiles, performance, gender narratives, and AI-based works. Rather than celebrating civilisation as a fixed achievement, the biennale questioned its structures and exclusions, proposing alternative ways of reading history and imagining the future. This dual curatorial framework signalled Ras Al Khaimah’s ambition to engage both tradition and innovation with equal seriousness.
Artists, Spaces, and Themes
The participating artists, ranging from established international voices to emerging practitioners, activated the village in diverse ways. Works by artists such as Sutee Kunavichayanont, Stefano Cagol, Hicham Benohoud, Hannan Abu-Hussein, Kawita Vatanajyankur, Francesca Fini, Sophy Abu Shakra, and others occupied restored interiors, open-air spaces, and outdoor sites where natural elements like wind, sand, and sea became part of the artistic process.
Thematically, the festival moved fluidly between the intimate and the global, personal memory and collective history, ecological concern and digital futures, spirituality and consumer culture. Civilisations emerged not as a nostalgic reflection, but as an open-ended question: what do we carry forward, and what do we leave behind?
Redefining the Cultural Map
RAK Art Festival 2026 demonstrated how a heritage village, once abandoned, can become a platform for some of the most relevant cultural conversations in the UAE today. Away from museum districts and metropolitan spectacle, the festival offered a slower, deeper encounter with art, one rooted in place, materiality, and human experience. For visitors and artists alike, Ras Al Khaimah revealed itself not as a peripheral destination, but as a confident cultural voice, showing that meaningful contemporary art can thrive beyond the familiar urban models.
As the winter season unfolded, one thing became clear: some of the most compelling conversations about civilisation, memory, and identity in the Emirates were happening by the sea, in a village where history still breathes.