Amman Design Week returns after seven-year hiatus, twice as large

Amman Design Week returned in October 2026 after a seven-year hiatus, and it came back twice as long as its 2019 edition, with almost twice as many participating designers. The Jordanian Design Biennial staged its fourth outing across exhibitions in Amman's Ras El Ain, Jabal Al Lweibdeh and Jabal Amman districts, plus the rural site of Iraq Al Amir, a 45-minute drive west of the city centre. For the first time, the event also reached beyond the capital with a satellite installation in Aqaba, Jordan's only coastal city, created with arts organisation Wujud.

Architect and curator Khaled Al-Bashir oversen a vastly expanded programme of talks, tours and workshops. It ranged from an experimental six-week weaving residency by Jordanian textile artist and wool researcher Ishraq Zraikat, to guided tours of community-led agroecological projects outside Amman, talks on the history of printing in Jordan and Palestine, and music performances with Amman-based Al Balad Theatre.

Why 'Accumulations' with an 's'?

The theme carried real weight. 'The suggestion here is that the project hasn't happened for seven years but the practices and designers have been showing up and working hard throughout that time and, to use the word, accumulating knowledge and skills and transferring that knowledge,' said exhibitions curator Faysal Tabbarah.

The theme was originally singular — Accumulation. 'When we added the "s" about three or four months into the work and made it plural, it was a significant moment for us and allowed us to have multiple narratives at the same time,' Tabbarah explained. Co-directors, Amman-based architects Bisher Tabbaa and Sarah Hejazin, added: 'So it's an acknowledgement that there has been work in the last seven years but also an acknowledgement that any work that happens here builds on work that came before us.'

The narratives are visible across the works on display. Architects and researchers Farah Alkhoury and Tigran Kostandyan, Iraqi and Armenian respectively, presented a research-based video piece on the toxic legacy of US imperialism in the Global South and the environmental violence of poisoned soil, water and air.

Collaboration, credited explicitly

Collaboration with artisans, manufacturers and what Tabbaa calls 'existing regional labour networks' runs through the edition, with makers always explicitly credited. Syrian-Lebanese designer Ranim AlHalaky showed glass vessels in blue, green and amber, blown into abstracted metal typographic structures representing her grandmother's voice. 'It's a way of translating sound into a visual and spatial language,' she said. The project was made in Damascus with Ahmad AlHalaak, one of the last remaining traditional glassblowers. 'He became an essential part of the design and making process and the work developed through our combined presence, knowledge and exchange,' she explained.

Tabbarah grouped the objects at the flagship Ras El Ain Hangar — a renovated, light-filled 1930s former electricity hangar — into three functional registers:

• Explicitly functional: the modular indoor/outdoor (Dis)Connect 2.0 chairs by local architects Daniel+Qusai, whose shape, colour and assembly the user selects.
• Vaguely functional: Studio Sarah Nagawi's inflated steel 'cabinets', which explore 'concavity' and create 'function through deformation'.
• Provocatively functional: Sufra by Raya Shaban, a tactile ceramic dining table with 80 tiles, some pressed to form food receptacles, named after the Arabic word for a cloth used to serve food. 'It provokes questions about how we eat, how we sit at a table and how we share,' said Tabbarah.

What happened beyond the Hangar?

Across the street in Ras El Ain Park, graphic designer and illustrator Abeer Anabtawi painted a permanent, colourful 30m-long basketball pitch adorned with tomatoes, wheat and chamomile — a tribute to food once grown there thanks to the area's abundant springs. Nearby, Syrian architect Wesam Al Asali framed the stepped outdoor space of the Al-Hussain Cultural Centre with vaulted local stone structures serving as seating, stage and enclosures. The lightweight vaulted technique, once prevalent in the Arab region, 'is an attempt to bring a construction technique back to its natural place,' he said.

In Jabal Al Lweibdeh, Darat Abu Adnan — a preserved 1950s heritage house renovated by owners Al Ameed Coffee, active since the 1970s and planning a year-round cultural venue — hosted the public programme and a Student Exhibition of 47 students mentored with designers for nine months. On the roof, Sharjah-based Architecture + Other Things built a yellow water-tank backdrop nodding to the city's roofscapes and to Paris Square's history as Dawar Al Hawuz (The Reservoir's Roundabout).

At Iraq Al Amir, Palestinian artist Dima Srouji, whose career took off at the first edition in 2016, placed 200 hand-blown glass snails and figs — made in Jaba, Palestine — inside the ruins of the 2nd-century BC Qasr Al Abed palace. She calls them the unfinished castle's 'first residents', a tribute to the area's springs and ecologies. Hikes to the palace included a visit and meal at a nearby women's cooperative working with ceramics and the area's distinctive clay.

What does this change for design in the region? The edition's scale, its satellite city and a permanent year-round venue in Darat Abu Adnan suggest Amman Design Week now intends to sustain momentum between biennials rather than wait another seven years.