Frieze Masters Abu Dhabi will ask visitors to follow objects as they travelled, rather than simply admire them in place. In a conversation published ahead of the inaugural fair, curator Marika Sardar described the historical section as an exploration of movement: how artists encountered traditions that were new to them through the arrival of foreign goods, and absorbed unfamiliar techniques, imagery and materials into their own work.

Sardar, whose research centres on South Asian and Islamic art, brings a museum background to the role, having worked at institutions including the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto and the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha. An early internship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she said, convinced her that direct contact with objects was the most thrilling way into art history, and a recent shift toward storytelling in museum displays has shaped how she now frames change in patronage, style and iconography.

The section's organising idea is the Indian Ocean, the network of trade routes that carried goods, knowledge and beliefs between Asia, Africa and the Middle East for centuries. Sardar argued that scholarship has often looked at those routes through European markets and political power, and that viewing them from Abu Dhabi opens up the intra-Asian connections that continued to shape artistic exchange, from the Deccan courts of South Asia to the Arabian ports.

She is particularly interested in the human stories behind the exchanges: the travellers, merchants, map-makers and writers who linked distant places long before modern transport, and whose maps and travel accounts feature among the displays. Many of the objects, she said, show a striking hybridity of cultures and should surprise visitors more familiar with contemporary art. Frieze Abu Dhabi runs from 19 to 22 November at Manarat Al Saadiyat, with 89 exhibitors from 37 countries and regions taking part in the first edition.