The best artist in each pavilion featured in Dubai Design Week

Dubai Design Week will be inaugurated next month at the newly launched Dubai Design District (d3). The event, which seeks to cement the impact of design in the region, will also introduce an initiative called "Abwab" (meaning Doors in Arabic), aiming to celebrate the work of designers from six countries, namely Saudi Arabia, UAE, Tunisia, Jordan, Kuwait, and Pakistan.

Abwab will bring together curators, artists, and designers from these six countries to collaborate and produce content around the theme of "Games: The Element of Play in Culture" within pavilions.

Afra Bin Dhaher is a UAE visual artist whose work has been exhibited in Turkey, the United States, and the UAE. She is mostly known for her  "Self-Portrait" series, in which she immerses herself within different aspects of the Emirati society to generate discourse on the subject of gender identity.

Haythem Zakaria blends Sufism with "unconventional" visual techniques such as glitch and cine-process to produce experimental plastic creations. Currently living in France, Zakaria works on unraveling the process of creation by going back to the image at it most primitive stage.

His latest work, Al Fatiha, is a laminated digital print, created with a specific algorithm, showing "combinatorial writing of the letters forming Surat Al-Fatiha."

Although being a writer by profession, Liane Al Gussain has worked on various films, installations. Her work has appeared Kuwait's pavilion in Venice Architecture Biennale 2014, NYU Abu Dhabi’s Searching for Ancient Arabia research project, and the Nuqat conference amongst them.

Omar Al Zo'bi is a graphic designer from Jordan that experiments with Arabic calligraphy and branding.

Disclaimer: the writer was unable to feature an artist from Pakistan due to a glitch in Dubai Design Week's website.