Long-form editorial from Exhibo and guest writers: curatorial essays, market analysis, fair reports, and deep dives into contemporary art worldwide.
Two imperial cities, one element in the ground — and the difference between a red city and an ochre one turns out to be half geology, half planning law.
Marrakech shows you the iron in its earth; Fez veils the same iron under lime. What makes each city relentlessly one colour, though, isn't the ground — it's what the twentieth century did to it.
The letter set loose, the line woven, the arabesque the West once threw away — and the women who built modern abstraction out of all three, then got written out of it.
Abstraction is usually told as a Western invention that arrived elsewhere late. Saloua Raouda Choucair, Etel Adnan, Madiha Umar and a room of others tell it differently — often as the only woman in the movement, building modern form from the geometry, craft and calligraphy their own culture already held.
The Khamsa across North Africa — Marrakech, Tunis, Algiers — and why the oldest thing about it is the shape, not the story.
Everyone calls it something different — the Hand of Fatima, the Hand of Miriam, the Hand of Mary. One five-fingered shape, several holy names, each written onto it by a community that made it its own. From a carved hand over the Alhambra's gate to Kabyle silver, synagogue lamps and a boy on a Marseille motorway, this is the story of a symbol older than the names it carries — and shared by more people than any one of them.
The Qur'an never mentions a ring. What grew in that gap instead: a demon, a seal, seven signs nobody can trace, a thousand years of amulets, and a star that ended up on a flag.
A fisherman pulls up a copper jar stopped with lead, and the mark of a signet ring is pressed into the lead. Everyone hearing this in ninth-century Baghdad knew what came next — they knew it from the lid. The strange part is that the ring they all knew about is not in the Qur'an.
How a French painter lent his surname to a blue that Morocco had been dyeing, firing and painting for centuries — and what that tells us about who gets to own a colour.
Everyone repeats the same tidy line: a painter fell in love with Marrakech, invented an electric blue, and trademarked it. Almost every clause is a simplification. The colour was already deep in Morocco's visual language — in indigo, in the cobalt of Fez, in the blue of zellige — long before Jacques Majorelle poured it over a single studio wall. What he actually did was rarer and stranger: not invent a colour, but compose a place, and attach a name to a hue no one can truly own.
A village half-buried in sand an hour from Dubai, a name that means "she of the little sickle," and what Emirati sources actually say.
The houses at Al Madam went up around 1980 and stood empty by the mid-1990s. People will tell you she lives there — not in the old stories, though. That attachment is recent, and it is the interesting part.
Why the Rif's famous blue is not an ancient inheritance but a colour the town has to keep repainting — and what all that repainting is really for.
Chefchaouen's blue washes off in a season. Which means the real question isn't where the colour came from, but why the town keeps putting it back.
A cup of coffee in the desert was a contract, a test, a truce, and a promise of protection — a whole social order in the tilt of a small white cup.
Among the Bedouin of Arabia, serving coffee was never just hospitality — it was a code. The order of the cups, the amount poured, the shake of the wrist that says enough: a whole unwritten language for turning a dangerous stranger into a guest, and sometimes an ally. The story of Arabic coffee as the social law of the desert — and how it lives on in the region's museums and art.
The wide roads and open blocks of the capital look like the luxury of a place with land to spare. They are closer to the opposite — a set of deliberate decisions about planning, land and time, made on an island that was never as limitless as it feels.
The easy explanation is desert plus oil money: room to spread and the means to spread into it. But space is not what a city has — it is what a city decides to do with what it has. Abu Dhabi's emptiness turns out to be almost entirely decided: a modernist grid, a founder who wanted straight roads so the capital could be reached quickly, a land system with no yearly tax and no deadline, a vast greening programme. The room was the plan.
The coffee plant is Ethiopian. But the drink — roasted, brewed, and made the center of a culture — is Yemeni.
Before the espresso machine, before the café, a Sufi in Yemen brewed a bean to stay awake for God. This is the story of how coffee became coffee — from the prayer lodges of the Shadhili order to the Red Sea port of Mocha that named a drink, and finally to the shape the Gulf poured all of it into: the dallah on the one-dirham coin.
The red of the world's tallest dunes isn't a fact about the sand — it's a record of everywhere the sand has been. A drowned sea, an ice-age wind and a buried green Arabia, all pressed into a single colour.
Everyone knows why Liwa is red: iron in the sand. It's true the way "the Gulf is white to reflect heat" is true — the first sentence of a much longer story. The red is a microscopically thin coat of rust on grains of clear quartz, and where those grains came from is almost impossible to picture from the dunes: the floor of a sea that no longer exists, lifted grain by grain and stacked three hundred metres high.
The geometry the Bedouin wove, and the women who carried it in memory because nothing was written down.
On a loom you stake into the sand, Bedouin women wove the interior world of the Gulf — tents, dividers, camel trappings — and threaded through the wool a geometry that carried tribe, family and meaning. A story of Sadu: the patterns and their names, the women who transmitted them without a single written word, and the quiet work of keeping the craft alive.
