Theatre of Digital Art (TODA)

Exhibo editorial

TODA opened in 2020 inside Souk Madinat Jumeirah — 1,800 square metres of projection surfaces, surround sound and darkness, in a building that is already theatrical before you add the technology. The idea is straightforward: take canonical works of Western art history — Van Gogh, Klimt, Monet, Kandinsky — and render them at architectural scale, floor to ceiling, with music. You stand inside the paintings rather than in front of them. After a renovation and reopening in April 2025, the space expanded its programme beyond the classical canon into digital works by international artists including Neuro Art, Lindsay Kokoska and Kristina Sidorova, and added a foyer gallery that has become a destination in its own right. The question that follows TODA — and every space like it — is what this means for art. Whether reproduction at scale and speed constitutes encounter, or something else. TODA's audience is enormous and genuinely diverse in ways that most Dubai galleries are not. For that audience, the paintings of Klimt on a building-sized screen may be the beginning of something. That has always been the argument for spaces like this and it is not a bad one.