Art Dubai opens tomorrow but The National has the rundown of artists, galleries and shows today:

At Artspace we get Adel El Siwi, a well-known Egyptian painter who goes in for spiky, witty portraits: think Sue Macartney-Snape’s Social Stereotypes cartoons fed through the brain of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Rose Issa is ploughing everything into Chant Avedissian’s sumptuous pop-culture riffs. Frey Norris is leading with the largest canvas yet from Kate Eric, the collaborative identity of Kate Tedman and Eric Siemans. […] The Saudi conceptualist (and army major) Abdulnasser Gharem shares a bill with the Egyptian pop-artist Khaled Hafez, the British-Iranian painter Sacha Jafri and Canada’s hi-tech artist Daniel Canogar. Dubai’s own Carbon 12 is coming out with its usual cast of international talents: a splashy fashion rage from the painter Katherine Bernhardt, spooky theatre interiors from Gil Heitor Cortesao and Sara Rahbar’s satirical textile collages among them. Clearly there’s still room for the something-for-everyone approach. […]

One group show is guaranteed to upstage the solo performances, though it will be a surprise if it adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Three artists from across the Menasa region (Middle East, North Africa and South Asia) have received Dh750,000 apiece from the Abraaj Capital Art Prize (ACAP), the largest art award on the planet. For the last six months they have been trying to produce a trio of ambitious new artworks. Kader Attia, Hala Elkoussy and Marwan Sahmarani (from Algeria, Egypt and Lebanon respectively) are the artists in question and Art Dubai will see the unveiling of their creations. The size of the prize alone means that the new work will be subject to close, and perhaps rather envious, scrutiny, and that puts the artists in a tricky position. They know they’ll be facing the crowd of their lives.

Watch this Space (The National)