Big news: Alserkal and Design Miami have just announced a major new partnership launching in 2027. That is right — the two are joining forces to create an entirely new platform for collectable design, rooted in Dubai but built for a global audience. The plan includes a jointly developed flagship fair and a series of year-round activations shaped by voices from the region and in dialogue with international communities. It is a huge step for the Middle East’s design scene and a fresh stage for designers to be celebrated.

And meanwhile, Design Miami is buzzing this year, bringing together a remarkable mix of artists and designers — including several from the Middle East — each presenting work that bridges heritage, experimentation, and contemporary design thinking. Their practices span sculpture, collectable furniture, lighting, and conceptual installation, but all share a sensitivity to material, history, and the emotional weight objects can carry.

Hicham Ghandour was born in Beirut in 1958, and after spending more than thirty years in New York, he eventually moved back to Lebanon in 2011. His background is actually quite fascinating — he trained in furniture and gilding restoration at FIT in New York and later at Palazzo Spinelli in Florence. That experience shaped his whole approach to craftsmanship. He even worked with the gilding conservation department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and collaborated on prototype pieces for Ralph Lauren Home. Since 2016, he has been designing exclusive works for Nilufar Gallery in Milan.

And at Design Miami 2025, he is showing pieces from his Mediterranean Collection. So what exactly is he presenting? There is this elegant green suede bench with an organic silhouette perched on bronze legs; a set of three trompe-l’œil bubble-wrap wall sculptures — they look like bubble wrap but are actually cast, turning texture into a kind of sculptural conversation; and a dramatic floor lamp made of glowing rock-crystal panels sitting on a concrete base.

Born in Cairo and educated in France, Ghada Amer is one of the most influential contemporary artists working today. Her career spans painting, sculpture, ceramics, installation, and garden design. She has exhibited widely at the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Centre Pompidou, and was awarded the UNESCO Prize in 1999.

Amer’s work consistently investigates the tensions between East and West, femininity and masculinity, art and craft. Through her signature embroidered paintings and sculptural works, she challenges restrictive norms surrounding the female body while reclaiming sensuality and desire through delicate, intimate gestures.

At Design Miami 2025, Amer presents a sculptural vase with an irregular, textured metal form. Polished highlights reveal subtle shifts in light and shadow, while her iconic sensual figures emerge through fine chiselling — as though rising from within the vessel itself.

Istanbul-born designer Feyza Kemahlıoğlu, founder of FEYZ Studio, merges architectural training with a deep connection to Turkish craft traditions. Educated at Carnegie Mellon University and Columbia GSAPP, she blends contemporary fabrication with artisanal glassblowing techniques to create sculptural lighting and objects with emotional and cultural resonance. She currently lives and works in New York City.

At Design Miami 2025, Kemahlıoğlu debuts her Landscapes Chandeliers, a new addition to her Dream in Calligraphy series. These monumental lighting pieces feature a large, looping metal structure resembling coiled branches. Hand-blown glass elements — rich with black and metallic flecks suggestive of tortoiseshell or leopard patterning — are adorned with tiny crystals and delicate handmade flowers.

The glass colours unfold in intentional gradients. A horizontal chandelier shifting from yellow to amber to orange to brown. A vertical 10-foot-high version moving from light green to tourmaline to bronze to deep brown. The result is a luminous, emotional landscape of light and motion — a celebration of material complexity and the poetry of handcrafted glass.

Roham Shamekh is actually one of the most interesting artist-designers working right now, especially from our region. He is based in Dubai, and what I love about his practice is how naturally he moves between art, design, and architecture. He is not someone who thinks in categories — everything blends together for him. And because of that, the pieces he creates feel more like emotional experiences than functional objects.

His studio is really experimental, very intuitive. He is constantly exploring ideas around transformation, intentionality, and this sense of reconnecting with yourself. His mobilier is never just something to sit on; it is more like an invitation to pause and check in with your inner world for a moment.

And at Design Miami this year, he is showing this sculptural sofa that he calls an ode to the universe. And honestly, that description fits — the piece feels cosmic in a way. It is about inner exploration, about allowing yourself to “make, believe,” and tap into your own emotional space.

Founded in 2022, KAMEH is a Dubai-based artist dedicated to handcrafting collectable design objects in collaboration with skilled local artisans in the UAE. This year, KAMEH is participating through a special project created for the 20th anniversary of Design Miami and curated by Glenn Adamson. The initiative brings together eight studios from around the world under the theme Make. Believe., and KAMEH’s contribution truly feels like stepping into another kind of landscape.

KAMEH's pieces are made from charred timber, carved into bold, monolithic forms. Each sculpture sits on a broad mirrored plinth, so when you look down, you suddenly see the hidden geometries beneath the work — almost like uncovering a secret dimension. The reflections create this mirage-like shimmer, immediately evoking the shifting horizons of the desert.

The installation, titled Nomadism of the Soul, becomes a meditation on movement, impermanence, and the traces we leave behind.

Adrian Pepe, a Honduran-born, Beirut-based fibre artist, works at the intersection of nature, culture, and material memory. His practice often begins with process and performance, evolving into objects that reveal how landscapes shift and how identities are shaped.

One project that captures this approach is A Shroud is a Cloth. In summer 2024, Pepe wrapped the Villa des Palmes — a heritage building heavily damaged in the Beirut port explosion — in handmade felted wool. The shroud, a material historically used to dress wounds, became a porous skin for the structure, drawing parallels between the healing of bodies and the attempted restoration of cities. Unlike the rigid scaffolding nets we’re used to seeing, Pepe’s textile moved with the wind, exposing the vulnerability of the building beneath it and reminding us that repair — whether architectural or human — is always partial, fragile, and in motion.

At Design Miami, in collaboration with SCAD, Adrian Pepe presents a work developed from his ongoing research into overlooked natural materials. While processing raw Awassi wool, he discovered seeds and plant fragments tangled in the fibres — small botanical forms designed to travel by attaching themselves to animals. For Pepe, these became “accidental archives,” quiet records of movement and migration hidden within the material.

In this piece, he brings those forms back into the wool through embroidery and felting. As the wool absorbs and distorts the stitched lines, the thread shifts from image to texture, echoing the way seeds move through animal fur and transform as they travel.

The result is a dense, textured surface that functions almost like a landscape — showing traces of friction, movement, and contact. Rather than illustrating nature, the work behaves like it, revealing how even the smallest fragment can carry a history of passage and change.

Nour Hage is a British-Lebanese artist and designer whose practice moves between textile and digital work, always circling back to West Asian identity, memory, and storytelling. Much of her research centres on women, the supernatural, and mental well-being.

In her physical work, she places strong emphasis on hand-driven processes — dyeing, embroidery, weaving — the kinds of labour that have shaped textile traditions for generations. By working this way, she draws attention to the knowledge carried through women’s hands and to the ways memory and technique are passed quietly from one generation to the next. Her pieces ask viewers to slow down and look closely, to consider how the work itself becomes a meeting point between different times, places, and lineages.

For Design Miami, Nour presents a tryptich, And they stayed together. The series draws on the long-standing belief that black protects children from the evil eye — a tradition where dark fabrics or kohl markings are used as a shield. Here, soft and coarse materials such as Piñatex, wool, and braided fibres come together to evoke the tenderness, friction, and restless movement of childhood. The work continues a narrative first introduced in Running around mother, happy (2022), an ode to her mother titled after a line from an Arabic lullaby. In this new chapter, the focus shifts to the bond between siblings and what it means to be one of three: to remain close, to remain whole, and to carry one another through moments of uncertainty and care.