Amman Design Week could have been on hiatus since 2019 however when the Jordanian Design Biennial returned earlier in October 2026 for its fourth version, it was with exceptional verve and confidence, as if the intervening years had virtually by no means occurred. Twice so long as the 2019 version, with virtually twice as many taking part designers, Amman Design Week consisted of main multi-designer exhibitions within the Ras El Ain, Jabal Al Lweibdeh, Jabal Amman districts of Amman in addition to within the lovely rural setting of Iraq Al Amir, a 45-minute drive west of the town centre.
For the primary time the occasion additionally had a presence outdoors Amman with a satellite tv for pc set up in collaboration with arts organisation Wujud in Aqaba, Jordan’s solely coastal metropolis within the south. There was additionally a vastly expanded talks, excursions and workshop programme overseen by architect and curator Khaled Al-Bashir, that ran the gamut from an experimental six-week weaving residency run by Jordanian textile artist, weaver and wool researcher Ishraq Zraikat to guided excursions by means of community-led agroecological initiatives outdoors Amman, and talks on the historical past of printing in Jordan and Palestine to music performances in collaboration with Amman-based Al Balad Theatre.
Amman Design Week 2026: ‘Accumulations’
The theme for this yr’s occasion was Accumulations. ‘The suggestion right here is that the mission hasn’t occurred for seven years however the practices and designers have been displaying up and dealing arduous all through that point and, to make use of the phrase, accumulating data and abilities and transferring that data,’ says this version’s exhibitions curator, Faysal Tabbarah. ‘So it is an acknowledgement that there was work within the final seven years but in addition an acknowledgement that any work that occurs right here builds on work that got here earlier than us,’ add the brand new co-directors of the occasion, Amman-based architects Bisher Tabbaa and Sarah Hejazin.
Initially, the theme was Accumulation, singular. ‘Once we added the “s” about three or 4 months into the work and made it plural, it was a big second for us and allowed us to have a number of narratives on the similar time,’ explains Tabbarah.
Video by arah Alkhoury & Tigran Kostandyan
(Picture credit score: Saifuldeen Fayez)
The layers and narratives are very evident within the work on show. There’s consideration to context, to native sources, vernaculars, inherited data and supplies, but in addition to up to date questions of id, social points or geopolitics. A implausible instance of the latter is the research-based video piece by Iraqi and Armenian (respectively) architects and researchers Farah Alkhoury & Tigran Kostandyan that delves into the poisonous legacy of US imperialism within the World South and the environmental violence of poisoning soil, water and air, which has cumulative and devastatingly long-term results on people.
I Held Your Voice in Glass, Ranim AlHalaky
(Picture credit score: Ranim AlHalaky)
I Held Your Voice in Glass, Ranim AlHalaky
(Picture credit score: Ranim AlHalaky)
There’s additionally lots of give attention to collaboration, between designers but in addition between designers and artisans, producers or ‘present regional labour networks’ as Tabbaa calls them, who’re all the time explicitly credited. A great instance is Syrian-Lebanese graphic designer and visible artist Ranim AlHalaky’s assortment of glass vessels in varied shades of blue, inexperienced and amber whose authentic varieties derive from the truth that the glass was blown into abstracted steel typographic constructions representing the designer’s grandmother’s voice.
‘It’s a approach of translating sound into a visible and spatial language,’ explains AlHalaky. The mission was made in Damascus in collaboration with one of many final remaining conventional glassblowers, Ahmad AlHalaak. ‘He turned a necessary a part of the design and making course of and the work developed by means of our mixed presence, data and change,’ she explains.
(Dis)Join 2.0 chairs by native architects Daniel+Qusai
(Picture credit score: Daniel+Qusai)
The objects and items on show within the flagship website of the Ras El Ain Hangar, a fantastically renovated and light-filled Thirties former electrical energy hangar nestled in a valley surrounded by Amman’s hills, in addition to within the extra home setting of Darat Abu Adnan (see under), cowl a spread of functionalities, says Tabbarah.
There are the ‘explicitly useful’ items, for instance, the extremely versatile indoor/outside (Dis)Join 2.0 chairs by native architects Daniel+Qusai that aren’t solely modular however enable the consumer to pick the form and color of every element after which assemble them themselves.
metal ‘cupboards’ by Studio Sarah Naghawi
(Picture credit score: Studio Sarah Naghawi)
Sufra desk by Raya Shaban
(Picture credit score: Raya Shaban)
There are the ‘vaguely useful’ items, such because the extraordinary inflated metal ‘cupboards’ by Studio Sarah Nagawi, which discover ‘concavity’ and create ‘operate by means of deformation’.
Lastly, there are the ‘provocatively useful’ objects corresponding to Sufra, a tactile ceramic eating desk named after the Arabic phrase for a material or desk used to serve meals. Designed by Raya Shaban, it options 80 ceramic tiles, a few of which have been pressed to kind receptacles for meals. ‘It provokes questions on how we eat, how we sit at a desk and the way we share,’ says Tabbarah. ‘So there’s a story embedded in it.
Abeer Anabtawi’s basketball courtroom
(Picture credit score: Abeer Anabtawi)
Outdoors the Hangar, there are extra works each within the courtyard and throughout the road in Ras El Ain Park. One of many latter is a everlasting set up, a vibrant 30m-long basketball pitch painted by native graphic designer and illustrator Abeer Anabtawi and adorned with photos of tomatoes, wheat and chamomile as a tribute to the meals that was grown on this space due to its ample springs.
Al-Hussain Cultural Centre outside seating by Wesam Al Asali
(Picture credit score: Edmund Sumner)
Not removed from right here an present outside area with stepped seating within the Al-Hussain Cultural Centre is remodeled and framed with vaulted constructions made out of native stone by Syrian architect Wesam Al Asali that operate as seating, stage and enclosures. Utilizing a light-weight vaulted method that has exceptional structural integrity was prevalent within the Arab area and ‘is an try and convey a development method again to its pure place,’ says Al Asali.
(Picture credit score: Edmund Sumner)
North of Ras El Ain, within the Jabal Al Lweibdeh district, is Darat Abu Adnan, a fantastically preserved Nineteen Fifties home and one of many few remaining heritage houses within the space, renovated by its new homeowners, native coffee-making firm Al Ameed Espresso, which has been energetic for the reason that 70s and plans to show it right into a year-round cultural venue.
It was host to most of Amman Design Week’s public programme and likewise its Pupil Exhibition, which showcased the work of 47 college students, from faculties, universities and institutes who have been mentored with designers for 9 months.
On the roof, the place talks and performances occurred, Sharjah-based observe Structure + Different Issues had created a vibrant backdrop of yellow water tanks as a nod to the roofscapes throughout the town which might be used each for water storage and as communal or household areas.
‘They’re additionally an specific gesture to the historical past of water in Paris sq., the place the home is situated,’ says Tabbarah. ‘Paris Sq. was as soon as often known as Dawar Al Hawuz (The Reservoir’s Roundabout) because it held an overground water tank that distributed water throughout the neighbourhood.’
Dima Srouji at Iraq Al Amir
(Picture credit score: Ali Saadi Images)
Dima Srouji at Iraq Al Amir
(Picture credit score: Ali Saadi Images)
In any case this city exercise, a reprieve from the town was provided within the rural and luxurious setting of Iraq Al Amir simply west of Amman. Right here Palestinian artist Dima Srouji, whose profession took off throughout Amman Design Week’s first outing in 2016, had crammed the evocative ruins of a 2nd century BC palace known as Qasr Al Abed with 200 glass snails and figs.
Blown by hand in Jaba, Palestine, she calls them the unfinished citadel’s ‘first residents’ and a tribute to the ecological previous and current of an space identified for its historic relationship to water and the springs, creeks and ecologies which have sustained life right here for hundreds of years.
Close by is a widely known girls’s cooperative who, she explains, ‘work so much with ceramics and pure supplies’. Due to its aquatic previous, the soil on this space may be very totally different from elsewhere in Jordan, and the clay may be very particular too so ‘there’s a robust relationship to craft’.
Throughout Amman Design Week, hikes to the palace included a go to and meal on the girls’s cooperative, encapsulating the ambitions, thoughtfulness and scope of the occasion. Design is nothing if not the folks, histories and contexts that make it and this comeback version of Amman Design Week introduced all these intertwined relationships to life fantastically.
