Curatorial shifts, high participant turnover, and new financial safeguards shape the second edition
The fair confirms 82 galleries, a new thematic framework, and enhanced logistical backing amid regional uncertainty.
Wikidata knows Gladiator was filmed in Morocco. It doesn’t know where.
Ouarzazate is the second most filmed place in the Middle East and North Africa, yet 25 of its 27 productions are recorded only in Wikipedia prose. We compared filming records worldwide and found that in the Arab world, Wikidata usually knows the country but not the place.
Azure lost a letter, alcohol was once eye make-up, and a sofa was a carpeted platform. A field guide to the art words English borrowed from Arabic — and how sure we can be about each one.
Your sofa, your cotton shirt and the sequins on a party dress all have Arabic roots. We checked 56 English words from the world of art — colour, cloth, architecture and the studio — against two major dictionaries to trace where each came from, which languages carried it, and which famous etymologies are still disputed.
Newly uncovered ceramic cargo near Kekova rewrites prehistoric navigation records
Archaeologists operating off the Turkish coast have recovered approximately thirty Early Bronze Age storage jars, offering rare physical proof of ancient maritime trade networks.
The earthen ksar that has played Rome, Jerusalem and Yunkai survives only because people keep rebuilding it. What cinema films as eternity is, wall by wall, a work of constant repair.
Aït Benhaddou is cinema's favourite image of the ancient past, from Gladiator to Game of Thrones. But its earthen walls last only as long as someone keeps repairing them, so the set for eternity is the freshest mud in Morocco.
A padlocked gate with no walls, two rival graves, and stories told among two dozen peoples: how the wise fool of the Islamic world became a shape every culture fills with itself.
In Akşehir, a tomb said to hold Nasreddin Hodja stands in an open pavilion behind a heavy padlocked gate — with no wall on either side. It is the perfect monument to a man who may not be in it. The stories told under his name belong to more than one tradition and more than one century: Turkish, Persian, Arab, Central Asian, Uyghur. Reformist satirists, Soviet novelists, Chinese animators and UNESCO have each tried to give him a fixed home.
Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento frame the 2027 edition around archival residue and spatial memory
The seventeenth iteration of the Sharjah Biennial runs from January to June 2027, presenting a dual curatorial methodology that examines historical legacies and infrastructural critique across multiple emirate locations.
The book that taught Europe to picture the East arrived with no pictures at all. Three centuries of illustrators — Dutch, Egyptian, Persian, French, German, Iraqi — each gave it a face, and every face was a self-portrait.
Open Galland's Thousand and One Nights, the edition that conquered Europe, and there is nothing to look at: no genie, no lamp, not one illustration. The most visually imagined book in the world began blind — and because its text was never fixed either, no picture of it could ever be a copy.
Founder Ali Güreli outlines spatial upgrades, Asian focus, and proposed fiscal incentives for the growing fair
The latest iteration of Contemporary Istanbul returns to Tersane Istanbul with a unified ground-level layout, a strategic pivot towards Asian galleries, and discussions surrounding potential tax reforms to stimulate corporate collecting.
Whistleblowers targeted over corruption claims and controversial investment legislation
Detentions of leading experts raise alarms over censorship, rapid site clearance, and the future of Iraq's archaeological record.
From Arrakis to Tatooine, when a film wants a desert to feel ancient, prophetic and alien, it reaches for an Arab and Berber vocabulary — and reveals more about the West that built it than the region it borrows from.
The wrapped faces, the trilling women, the barely-displaced Arabic: cinema's alien deserts keep sounding Arab. But the vocabulary was assembled in the West — from Orientalist painting to Lawrence to Dune — and it says more about who is looking than about anyone being looked at.
The twenty-first edition welcomes seventeen new exhibitors while navigating regional economic headwinds
A look at how the Istanbul fair balances local momentum with international growth against a backdrop of macroeconomic volatility.
