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A Persian-style black lacquer panel painted in the gol o bolbol manner — pink roses in full bloom around a single perched nightingale
Editorial

Dubai · United Arab Emirates

The Flower That Was Never Only Beautiful

The rose rules Persian poetry and painting — but under the sweetness sits a thorn, a bleeding bird, and a national emblem quietly assembled out of Chinese, European and Persian parts. A history of gol o bolbol, from a medieval still to a Dubai gallery.

Gol o bolbol — the rose and the nightingale — is among the most beautiful images in a thousand years of Persian art, and in modern Persian it also means sweet, empty talk. Under the tile, the picture is darker: a bird singing in blood for a flower that will not answer and will not last.

A full moon rising over dark water on the Abu Dhabi coast, a single bright disc against a black sky.
Editorial

Abu Dhabi · United Arab Emirates

The Word for Beautiful Was the Word for Moon

The moon has been the measure of a beautiful face in Arabic verse for fifteen centuries — but beauty was only one of the things that light was ever asked to carry. A history of one disc, from a pre-Islamic ode to a glowing sphere over an Abu Dhabi harbour.

Ya qamar — you moon — is the oldest compliment in Arabic, and almost nothing about it means what we assume. The moon it praised was not always a woman, not always even a kindness, and in the end not only about beauty at all.

Sunlight falls in scattered points through the perforated dome of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, Jean Nouvel's "rain of light," onto the pale stone of the museum's interior.
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.

An Arabian oryx, white with long nearly straight ringed horns and dark facial markings, standing in pale desert sand.
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.

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

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.

Aerial view of central Abu Dhabi showing its wide arterial roads and rectangular superblocks, towers lining the perimeters with lower buildings
Editorial

Abu Dhabi · United Arab Emirates

Why Abu Dhabi Has So Much Empty Space

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 deep rust-red mega-dunes of the Liwa crescent in the Empty Quarter, rising in smooth ridges under clear sky, with a thin line of green date palms at their base
Editorial

Abu Dhabi · United Arab Emirates

Why Liwa Is Red

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.

Renoir's Double Portrait of Berthe Morisot Joins the Permanent Galleries at Louvre Abu Dhabi

Abu Dhabi · United Arab Emirates

Renoir's Double Portrait of Berthe Morisot Joins the Permanent Galleries at Louvre Abu Dhabi

The 1894 painting, the latest addition to the Abu Dhabi Masterpieces Collection, will be on view for a year alongside Monet, Japanese prints and photography that trace Impressionism's cross-cultural roots.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir's 1894 double portrait of Berthe Morisot and her daughter, Julie Manet, is now on display in the permanent galleries of Louvre Abu Dhabi for one year — the latest addition to the Abu Dhabi Masterpieces Collection, placed in dialogue with Monet, Japanese prints and period photography.