Innenkreis, the Copenhagen gallery whose name is German for “inner circle”, makes its debut at NOMAD Abu Dhabi with An Evening Pavilion. From 18 to 22 November 2026 it occupies Booth B16 in the Boutiques section. The booth sits in a vaulted niche of the former Terminal 1 at Zayed International Airport, where contemporary art and design share a low, open room with a Viennese classic from 1905.
The pavilion takes its cue from the traditional majlis. In other words, it is a low-slung space made for long conversation and slow hospitality in the evening hours, after the heat of the day has gone.
A daybed at the centre of the NOMAD Abu Dhabi booth
Lærke Ryom’s Raiments Daybed sits at the heart of the room. Beside it are a low stool, a table lamp and two wall lamps from the same series. Ryom treats furniture as something dressed rather than upholstered. So instead of stretching and stapling fabric into a rigid shape, she cuts coverings that sit on the frame. As a result, the drape, folds and weight of the material stay in view.
On the daybed, Kvadrat wool is stitched entirely by hand into quilted channels that follow the geometry of the steel. At each end the wool runs past the frame and folds toward the floor. The piece measures 52 by 254 by 81 cm and is unique.
The stools, shown for the first time at NOMAD Abu Dhabi, bring the series down to a more intimate scale. They also extend Raiments, the series with which Innenkreis opened in 2026. Ryom’s Enfold Chair stands at the edge of the group. Its dark leather is ruched vertically and drawn tight around a slender frame of brushed steel. At the back, a row of horn buttons fastens it.
Ryom’s lamps are lit through their whole bodies. On the wall lamp, for example, hand-stitched wool covers a steel frame with a softly curved front panel. The light comes through the textile, while the stitching and bound edges stay visible.
A Viennese table from 1905
Beside Ryom’s pieces stand Josef Hoffmann’s Four Nesting Tables, Model No. 988, designed in 1905 and made by Jacob & Josef Kohn in Vienna. They come from the years when Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstätte brought the square and the grid into modern design. At the fair, their latticed sides pick up the geometric patterns on the walls of the niche. Two traditions of ornament therefore meet across a century.
Mirrors cast from a beetle’s path
On the back wall hang the Speculum mirrors by Et Arrangement, the collaboration of Danish architects Laura Storbjerg and Lærke Dorthea Reid Harder Rasmussen. The series began beside an oak nearly two thousand years old. First, the pair photographed the tunnels a wood-boring beetle had carved beneath its bark. Then they traced them by hand, digitised them, milled them into wood and cast them in tin.
A small mirror opens at the heart of each cast-tin surface, and the viewer’s reflection appears among the tracks. Innenkreis links this to Sufi thought, in which the heart is a mirror polished over a lifetime of seeking. The name comes from the alloy once used to cast mirrors before silvered glass.
Oyster and glass
Charlotte Moreno Kølkjær, a Copenhagen-based artist born in 1990, shows Ostra Reliquiae X, an oyster vase in glazed stoneware. A ridged grey-green shell opens onto a flushed red interior. The gallery reads the oyster both as a symbol of fleeting luxury and as a reference to the pearling that shaped life in Abu Dhabi for centuries before oil.
Close by hangs a glass sculpture by Maria Koshenkova, a Russian-Danish artist born in 1981. Trained first in ballet, she works molten glass through a physical process, alongside master glassblowers and with tools of her own. In this way, heat, gravity and pressure shape each piece. She was a finalist for the LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize and took part in the Danish Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. Her Untitled 1 hangs from a length of dusky pink rope threaded through a loop of ruby glass.
About Innenkreis
Founded in 2026 by Zeynep Rekkali Jensen, Innenkreis shows contemporary art and design alongside decorative arts made before 1940, with craft as its foundation. In short, at NOMAD Abu Dhabi quilted wool, pleated leather, tin, stoneware and glass share one room with a century-old Viennese design. More on the presentation is on the Innenkreis website.
Gallery: Innenkreis / @innenkreis
Photography: Robert Damisch, Cæciliie Philipa Vibe Pedersen, Line Klein
Location: NOMAD Abu Dhabi, Former Terminal 1, Zayed International Airport, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
