The Guardian's James Westcott visited our Art Dubai 2011 booth, then shown under the name Artspace, and described it as the fair's "revolution" booth, with works responding to the uprising in Egypt.
Writing in the week that Art Dubai and the Sharjah Biennial opened, Westcott asked how the art world in the Gulf was responding to the Arab Spring. Art Dubai was then in its fifth year, with 82 galleries from 43 countries in the halls of Madinat Jumeirah, and our booth was one of eight from Dubai.
The centrepiece was a mural sized canvas by the Egyptian artist Khaled Hafez, collaging soldiers and protesters in Tahrir Square over pixelated colour and drips of paint. Hafez told Westcott that the work began as an abstract colour field, and that as the revolution unfolded he turned it into a tribute to friends from the Cairo art scene, built from their own snapshots of the protests. The booth also showed Bye Bye Hosni by the Moroccan painter Zakaria Ramhani, a protester tearing down a poster of Mubarak.
The review is a record of an early moment in the gallery's history, when Arab artists were answering events as they happened and our fair presentations carried that urgency.