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Editorial

Abu Dhabi · United Arab Emirates

The Universal Museum, Rebuilt on Arab Soil

How Abu Dhabi took one of the West's most contested ideas — the museum that claims to hold all of humanity — and moved the question of who gets to frame the world

A portolan chart in the floor, three ewers without a hierarchy, and a $450-million Leonardo no one has seen since it was bought. The Louvre Abu Dhabi is a French–Emirati experiment in what the universal museum becomes when it is rebuilt from a different centre — and whether that moves the centre, or merely moves the Louvre, is the question the building leaves open.

Editorial

Tunis · Tunisia

Women Makers: Sadu, Sejnane and the Art the West Called Craft

How the women of Sejnane and the Sadu tents made a world of geometric art the museum system had no shelf for — and how it is finally being called by its name.

Two women's traditions — the clay of Sejnane in Tunisia, the woven tents of the Arabian Peninsula — share no bloodline, only a rhyme: the same spare geometry, held and passed down by women, in whatever material their world gave them. This is the story of the visual knowledge the West filed under "craft," the makers it kept downstairs, and the contemporary artists now carrying it back up into the room where "art" is defined.

Editorial

Jeddah · Saudi Arabia

Why Jeddah Was Built From Coral

A treeless port with no stone quarried its whole city out of the reef offshore — then oil and concrete let it walk away from the sea that built it.

Jeddah's old town isn't decorated with coral. It's made of it — reef cut soft from the water and hardened into towers. The strange part is what happened when the city no longer needed the sea.

Editorial

Abu Dhabi · United Arab Emirates

The Animal We Drew Everywhere Once It Was Gone

From Neolithic rock to airline tailfin — how the Arabian oryx vanished from the desert, came back from nine animals, and multiplied everywhere as a symbol in the very decades it was gone.

The last wild Arabian oryx was shot in 1972. By then it was already a picture — carved on Bronze Age tombs, mistaken by the ancients for a unicorn, praised by poets as the eyes of the beloved. This is the story of an animal that went extinct in the wild and was brought back from nine survivors, and of the strange gap between the creature and the emblem it became: fast, sharp and ascendant on a nation's tailfin, while the animal itself survives by standing still in the shade.

Editorial

Istanbul · Turkey

Seventy Thousand Solomons: The Empire That Performed a Legend

A demon catalogue in the conqueror's library, a sixteenth-century text where kingship is an office held seventy thousand times, and the columns a sultan dragged across three provinces to prove he held it.

Mehmed II kept a Greek catalogue of demons in his library at Topkapı. Seventy years later a sultan named for a prophet was rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem and hauling Roman columns out of Egypt and the Lebanon into a mosque above the Golden Horn. In between, Ottoman writers turned Solomon from a warning into a job — and the empire applied for it in stone.

Editorial

Marrakech · Morocco

Why Marrakech Is Red and Fez Is Ochre

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.

Editorial

Beirut · Lebanon

Women of Arab Abstraction

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.

Abu Dhabi · United Arab Emirates

Valerie Hillings Appointed Inaugural Director of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi

The former NCMA chief returns to the capital to shape the Saadiyat Island venue's debut year and curatorial strategy

Valerie Hillings has been named the founding director of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, marking a significant leadership shift ahead of the island campus's December inauguration.

Dubai · United Arab Emirates

CMPLX to Bring a New Creative Playground to Dubai's Al Quoz This Year

A seven-warehouse lifestyle hub combining food, wellness, retail and creative studios is set to open in Al Quoz Creative Zone by the end of 2026, adding a new anchor to the neighbourhood built around Alserkal Avenue.

CMPLX, a new warehouse-style lifestyle destination combining food, wellness, retail and creative studios, is set to open in Dubai's Al Quoz Creative Zone by the end of 2026 — adding a fresh anchor to a neighbourhood already defined by Alserkal Avenue's galleries and cultural spaces.

Editorial

Marrakech · Morocco

The Hand That Everyone Named After Their Own

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.

Editorial

Cairo · Egypt

The Seal of Solomon: The Object That Grew Around One Word

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.

Editorial

Marrakech · Morocco

Majorelle Blue: How a Painter (Almost) Trademarked a Colour

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.