At Abwab 2026, you can walk into it. Five commissioned practices take the theme In Other Words and turn it into rooms: a letter that glows as a seven-metre red sign for silence, handmade paper that holds memory, a script rebuilt in layers of translucent cloth, a floor of mistranslated text, and a weaver’s secret code that becomes architecture.

For the first time, Dubai Design Week’s commissioning programme drops its individual pavilions and gathers everything under one roof, asking what we say, what we leave out, and what survives the translation.

Dalia Rafeh

Dalia Rafeh, whose artistic work explores Arabic language and visual expression, presents Shhhhhhhh, transforming the familiar Arabic letter ش  and its association with the call for quiet into a seven-metre installation of red light. Drawing on the visual language of public and commercial signage, the repeated form makes silence visible, inviting interpretations that move between command, pause, reflection and listening.

Grace Shieh

Writer and visual artist Grace Shieh explores handmade paper as a language in its own right through A Library of Paper Memories. Combining papermaking, poetry and experimental writing, the installation considers how fibre, texture and form can carry memory and meaning, inviting audiences to experience reading beyond the conventional written page.

Kanaka Raghavan

Dubai-based designer, educator and researcher Kanaka Raghavan presents Cheent Devanagari, reconsidering Devanagari typography through the script's own structural and material traditions. Challenging the use of Latin typography as a universal design default, the work draws on block printing and ornament, using translucent textile layers that separate and recompose as visitors move around them, transforming the construction of letterforms into a spatial experience.

UBIK

India-based conceptual artist UBIK presents Non/Sense, a floor-based intervention inspired by science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick's How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later. Through processes of translation, mistranslation, abbreviation and the use of Lorem Ipsum, fragments of text gradually evolve into visual patterns and spatial structures, questioning how language is interpreted and understood.

VARUSSI

A Dubai-based architecture and research practice founded by Owais Asif Khan and Samreen Junaid Wani, presents Taleem, drawing on the coded system of notation used in Kashmiri carpet and Kani shawl making. Traditionally used to communicate instructions between designer and weaver, this inherited language of craft is translated into an architectural installation that visitors can physically enter and experience, revealing the knowledge embedded in traditional systems of making.

The space itself becomes part of the show, with audiences moving around, between and through the works, and seeing them again from above. Visitors can also join three free curator-led walkthroughs with Alexie Glass-Kantor, Caoimhe CJ Reynolds and the participating practitioners. The exhibition is free to visit.