NOMAD Abu Dhabi 2026: An Evening Pavilion
Forthcoming event
Overview
Former Terminal 1, Zayed International Airport, Abu Dhabi
Booth B16, Boutiques
www.nomad-circle.com
Innenkreis, German for 'inner circle', occupies a vaulted niche within the former terminal, now reimagined as a quiet pavilion for the evening hours. Inspired by the traditional majlis, the low-slung, open space is designed for lingering conversation and slow hospitality, capturing the warmth that lingers long after sunset.
Lærke Ryom's Raiments Daybed sits at the heart of the pavilion, a place to recline as the evening lengthens, with a low stool drawn close, surrounded by a table lamp and two wall lamps from the same series. Ryom dresses furniture the way one dresses a body, and the Raiments series carries the old word for garments in its name. Unveiled for the first time at NOMAD, the stools extend the series with which Innenkreis opened in 2026. Ryom's Enfold Chair stands at the edge of the gathering, its dark leather pleated over a slender frame of brushed steel and fastened at the back with horn
buttons.
Beside them stand Josef Hoffmann's Nesting Tables of 1905, conceived in Vienna during the years when Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstätte carried the square and the grid into the language of modern design. The lattice of the sides echoes the geometric patterns on the niche walls, and two traditions of ornament meet across a century.
On the back wall hang the Speculum mirrors by Et Arrangement. Their cast-tin surfaces record the paths of a wood-boring beetle beneath the bark of a centuries-old oak, a small life's wandering held line by line. At the heart of each opens a mirror, and the viewer's reflection appears among the tracks. In Sufi thought, the heart is a mirror, polished through a lifetime of seeking, and the wanderer's path is itself the way; here the beetle's journey through the oak and our own passage through the world resemble each other.
Charlotte Moreno Kølkjær's Oyster Vase, in glazed stoneware, opens from a ridged grey-green shell onto a flushed red interior glaze, recalling the oyster beds of the Gulf, where pearling shaped Abu Dhabi's life for centuries before oil. Close by, a glass sculpture by Maria Koshenkova hangs in molten folds, bound with a length of rose-coloured rope. Surrounded by the interplay of quilted wool, pleated leather, tin mirrors, glazed stoneware and sculpted glass, contemporary art and design and a century-old Viennese classic share one inner circle.
Works
Press release
Artists and Designers
Lærke Ryom is a Danish designer whose furniture and lighting are dressed in textile, wool and canvas
drawn over steel and bound at the edge. Her solo exhibition Raiments opened Innenkreis in 2026 and received a Præmiering award from the Danish Arts Foundation.
Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956) was a Viennese architect and designer and a co-founder of the Wiener
Werkstätte in 1903. His geometric grids shaped the language of early modern design in Vienna and
remain among its most recognised forms.
Et Arrangement is the collaboration of Danish architects Laura Storbjerg and Lærke Dorthea Reid
Harder Rasmussen. Their Speculum series moves from photograph to hand tracing, digital drawing, CNC milling and casting in tin, carrying the precision of architectural process into the intimacy of the hand-held surface.
Charlotte Moreno Kølkjær (b. 1990) is a Copenhagen-based artist working primarily in ceramics. Her sculptural objects and material studies trace decadence and metamorphosis as aesthetic and cultural-historical narratives, seen through contemporary perspectives on femininity and beauty, and follow how desire, value and time settle into surfaces.
Maria Koshenkova (b. 1981) is a Russian-Danish artist working in glass. Drawing on an early training in ballet, she approaches the molten material through a physical, almost choreographic process, working alongside master glassblowers and with tools of her own devising, so that heat, gravity and pressure take part in shaping each form. Her sculptures stretch, twist and coil into tensile bodies suspended between abstraction and flesh. Koshenkova was a finalist for the LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize 2026 and took part in the Danish Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. Her work is exhibited in public institutions across Europe, Asia and the United States. She lives and works in Copenhagen.