About the work
Audience turns the gaze back onto the spectators, depicting a crowd gathered for a performance. Painted for Frogs, Jazz & Blisters, her debut solo exhibition, the work belongs to a body of paintings about living between London and Kuwait, or 'being two Dalals'. Al-Obaidi explores the act of watching and being watched, and the quiet sense of belonging and estrangement felt within a group.
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The City With No Ruins: What Is Left of Abbasid Baghdad
A caliph drew his capital in fire, the Mongols erased it, and a video game rebuilt it out of Isfahan and Samarkand. What actually survives of Abbasid Baghdad, where it is, and who else has tried to put it back.
Climb a viewpoint in Assassin's Creed Mirage and you see the Round City whole — double walls, four gates, the green dome at the centre. Nobody has ever seen that view. No excavated remains have been securely identified as any of it. This is what is actually left of ninth-century Baghdad, where you would have to go to stand in it, and why Ubisoft was the second team to rebuild a city that no longer exists.
Sharjah Art Museum: Who Gets to Draw the Arab World
Inside one of the Gulf's first dedicated art museums, the Western Orientalist pictures that once framed the East hang under the collection of the ruler who spent his life writing back against them
In one Sharjah gallery hang the Western pictures that once framed the East — assembled by the ruler who spent his life contesting them. A long read on who controls the image of a place.
Petra Beyond Indiana Jones
The 1989 film gave Petra a façade and invented everything behind it. The real story is in the water systems, the aniconic sculpture, the painter who framed your photograph in 1839 and the families moved out so the world could come in.
Spielberg's crew filmed the Treasury's façade in Jordan, then built the Grail chamber on a soundstage in Hertfordshire — because the real interior of Al-Khazneh is a plain, undecorated room. It's a perfect miniature of how Petra is understood: one wall, photographed a million times a year, standing in for a city that is mostly still unexcavated.
Louvre Abu Dhabi Unveils Its 2026–2027 Season: Four Exhibitions Spanning Antiquity to the Contemporary
The Saadiyat Island museum announces a year-long programme that moves from ancient board games and Indian Ocean trade routes to conflict-zone heritage preservation and a first-ever GCC–India contemporary art prize.
Louvre Abu Dhabi has announced four major exhibitions for its 2026–2027 season, tracing a single curatorial thread — exchange, movement, and cultural resilience — across ancient board games, Indian Ocean maritime history, a landmark GCC–India contemporary art prize, and heritage preservation in conflict zones.