What makes a place feel like home? Is it where you were born, where you grew up, or just somewhere you have spent enough time to feel that you belong? And can the same place mean completely different things to the people who live there?

These are some of the questions behind the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial 2026, returning for its second edition this October. And rather than asking us to think about them inside a museum, the biennial is bringing contemporary art directly into the streets and public spaces of Abu Dhabi and Al Ain.

Organised by the Department of Culture and Tourism — Abu Dhabi, the event will bring together more than 20 artists across four key locations. It opens in Al Ain on October 23, followed by Abu Dhabi on November 15, and will run until February 15, 2027.

The theme of this year's biennial is Home: A Glossary for a Communal Sense of Place. It sounds a little academic, but the idea behind it is something most of us have probably thought about at some point.

Home isn't necessarily a house, a city or even a country. Sometimes it is a familiar sound, a particular smell, a conversation in your native language or a place you keep coming back to. And sometimes it is something you build together with other people.

In the UAE, where people from so many different backgrounds live alongside one another, that question feels particularly relevant. What does belonging look like in a place where everyone might have a different understanding of home?

This is what the participating artists will explore through installations, site-specific commissions and projects that invite people to interact with their surroundings.

The biennial is led by Elvira Dyangani Ose, former director of Barcelona's Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), whose curatorial work has long focused on the relationship between art, communities and public space.

The newly announced lineup includes some particularly interesting names, and their previous work gives us a few clues about the conversations we might encounter.

Ibrahim Mahama, for example, is known for transforming ordinary, often discarded materials into monumental installations. The Ghanaian artist has covered entire buildings with old jute sacks, drawing attention to the people, labour and trade routes behind objects we rarely think twice about.

Then there is Yinka Shonibare, the British-Nigerian artist whose colourful works often use Dutch wax fabrics to question ideas of cultural identity, colonial history and what it means to belong somewhere.

Reena Saini Kallat, who will participate in the Al Ain programme, approaches these questions from another direction. Her work frequently deals with borders, migration and the connections that exist between places, even when political boundaries suggest otherwise. In her Woven Chronicle series, for instance, electrical wires become maps of human movement and global relationships.

Another name worth knowing is Serge Attukwei Clottey, who transforms yellow plastic water containers into installations and sculptural works. Through these everyday objects, the Ghanaian artist explores questions of ownership, migration, environmental change and cultural memory.

These are examples of the artists' existing practices rather than confirmed descriptions of their new biennial commissions. Still, they offer an interesting starting point for understanding how differently the idea of home can be approached.

The programme will also include Akram Zaatari, Kapwani Kiwanga, Nari Ward, Iván Argote, Marinella Senatore and UAE-based artists, including Khalid Albanna, Shama Al Hamed and Roudhah Al Mazrouei, among others.

If you visited the first Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial in 2024–2025, you probably remember that some of its works were quite difficult to miss.

There were Farah Al Qasimi's enormous iridescent oyster shells, Homesickness, referencing the Gulf's pearl-diving history. Christopher Joshua Benton's Where Lies My Carpet Is Thy Home turned the familiar idea of a carpet into something much larger, exploring hospitality and the spaces we share. And Paweł Althamer's Tentarium brought a giant cat-shaped tent into Lake Park.

The interesting thing about these works wasn't just their scale. It was where people encountered them. You didn't necessarily have to plan an art outing. You could simply be walking through the city and find yourself standing in front of an installation.

Some works from that first edition have since been retained as long-term installations, becoming part of Abu Dhabi's public art collection.

And perhaps that is what makes the upcoming edition worth paying attention to. It isn't simply about bringing art to unexpected locations. It is about asking whether art can change our relationship with places we thought we already knew.

After all, home isn't only somewhere we live. It is also something we create, remember and share.