For its first participation in Nomad, NINETTO presents APOLIS, a new series of sculptures and paintings by French artist Hugo Avigo that resemble fragments of a public world — objects that could come from urban systems, tools, furniture, or signals — yet appear detached from any clear origin or use. They seem to have slipped from a familiar urban environment into a space of fiction.

The Abu Dhabi edition took place inside the decommissioned Terminal 1 at Zayed International Airport — an icon of regional modernism conceived in the late 1970s by Paul Andreu, the renowned architect behind Paris’ Charles de Gaulle.




Hugo Avigo develops a bold practice that plays with a controlled exaggeration of the codes of sculpture, painting, and installation. Through these different media, his artistic practice explores the realms of public space, speculative fiction, and self-healing. Inhabiting space in unexpected ways, his works—often extravagant in form and disproportionate in scale—challenge our preconceived notions about bodies and their gravity, places and their functions, in order to destabilize our perception of everyday life.