Lebanese artist Dala Nasser has been named the first winner of the Frieze Abu Dhabi Artist Award, and will present a new installation, Qubbat Duris, at the fair's inaugural edition from 19 to 22 November. Curated by Nabila Abdel Nabi, senior curator of international art at Tate Modern, the site-responsive work will fill the atrium of Manarat Al Saadiyat, turning the fair's entrance into a space for reflection, memory and exchange.

The installation takes its name from a 13th-century monument near Baalbek, in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, whose composite structure carries the region's layered history: fragments of Roman limestone sarcophagi rest on eight granite columns from earlier centuries. In Abu Dhabi, a timber framework will recall the heritage site, draped with paintings on textile that bear traces of the surrounding landscape. Charcoal rubbings of the remaining ruins, worked with ash, raw clay and terracotta, form the heart of the piece, which reflects on how materials carry memory across generations and on a shared responsibility towards landscapes facing destruction.

Nasser, born in Tyre in 1990 and based between London and Lebanon, works through abstraction and alternative forms of image-making, bringing sound, performance and film into a practice that remains rooted in painting. She works with the medium's most elementary materials — fabric, pigments, stretcher bars and mark-making — treating material as a witness to historical conditions shaped by colonial systems and the ecological and psychological damage they leave behind. Recent exhibitions include Cemetery of Martyrs at Nottingham Contemporary, KM21 in The Hague and Peer in London in 2026, and Xiloma MCCCLXXXVI at Kunsthalle Basel in 2025.

Qubbat Duris is the first commission created for the new award, a platform supporting ambitious artistic production and major new works made in dialogue with the cultural contexts of the region. The Frieze Artist Award was established at Frieze London in 2014, and past recipients include Sophia Al-Maria, Lawrence Lek, Abbas Zahedi, Sung Tieu and Alberta Whittle. The Abu Dhabi award is supported by Friends of Frieze Abu Dhabi.