Manar Abu Dhabi 2025 lights up the Emirates with visionary public art

Abu Dhabi’s cultural landscape takes on a radiant new life as Manar Abu Dhabi 2025, the city’s ambitious public art and light festival, opens its second edition across the emirate. Running from November 15th, 2025 to January 4th, 2026, the exhibition transforms coastal promenades, mangrove islands, and UNESCO-inscribed oases into a constellation of illuminated artworks that reflect the region’s enduring relationship with light. Curators note that this year’s theme, The Light Compass, acts as both metaphor and navigational guide, directing visitors through more than 20 newly commissioned installations that stretch from Jubail Island to Al Ain.

A light festival reimagining place and presence

This edition expands significantly in scale, drawing visitors into an immersive journey across natural and urban geographies. The curatorial team emphasizes that the light festival was conceived as a study of orientation—how light shapes memory, mobility, and perception in the Gulf. Jubail Island serves as the anchor site, presenting a sweeping array of installations that merge technology, ecology, and architectural imagination. Artists from the UAE and abroad reinterpret light not merely as illumination but as a living medium capable of storytelling, transformation, and emotional resonance.

Studio DRIFT: light, movement, and the poetry of technology

Among the central contributors, Studio DRIFT introduces three major works that explore the shifting boundaries between nature and digital systems. Curators explain that the collective sought to visualize forces normally sensed but not seen. One of their new pieces, Whispers (2025), forms a sprawling field of illuminated stems modeled on wild grasses; each element responds to wind, creating a living choreography that merges environment and artwork. Their second installation, Unfold (2025), uses biometric data to translate visitors’ heartbeats into blooming digital flowers, offering an intimate, individualized encounter with light. Completing their trio, Wind of Change (2025) stages a monumental drone performance that maps invisible currents in the sky—an aerial meditation on time, motion, and the natural world.

Step into DRIFT’s world in our interview, covering their upcoming museum project, the ethics of emerging technologies and the importance of shared visions for the future. 

Other highlights across the archipelago

Malaysian artist Pamela Tan debuts Eden (2025), a contemplative outdoor installation where slender vertical structures hold luminous glass spheres that glow like suspended droplets. The work creates a serene clearing within the mangroves, inviting visitors to pause and observe subtle shifts in the landscape. Nearby, Emirati sculptor Shaikha Al Mazrou presents Contingent Object (2025), a circular salt-formed plane that evolves continuously through evaporation and crystallization; at night, a soft ring of light transforms it into a lunar-like disc resting on the earth. Meanwhile, digital art studio Iregular contributes a suite of interactive works, including As Water Falls, an ever-changing waterfall of light responsive to touch and motion.

A citywide stage for imagination

Along Mina Zayed’s waterfront, KAWS introduces a monumental illuminated Companion reclining with a glowing moon lifted skyward—an instantly iconic landmark that anchors the coastal segment of the exhibition. Curators describe the figure as a bridge between pop culture and place-making, transforming the harbor into a theatrical stage of reflection and scale.

A landmark edition for Abu Dhabi’s cultural future

Across its many sites, Manar Abu Dhabi 2025 presents light as both compass and catalyst. Each work contributes to a larger narrative of how art interacts with environment, community, and memory. With contributions from more than a dozen Emirati and international artists, the exhibition affirms Abu Dhabi’s growing presence on the global cultural map.