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.
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.
A valley in southern Jordan has become cinema's favourite Mars — not because it is like the planet, but because it looks like the one we carry in our heads.
Put Wadi Rum beside a rover photograph and you can't tell which is Mars. But the desert shares almost nothing with the real planet except its colour — and lately, the illusion has grown powerful enough that real space missions have come to Jordan to rehearse.
A survey of Kazakh tapestry pioneers redefines fibre art at Almaty's Kasteyev Museum
Eight decades after her birth, Batima Zaurbekova's textile innovations take centre stage in a major retrospective that bridges Central Asian craft and contemporary visual culture.
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.
The publisher's first West Asian venture brings global heavyweights and regional pioneers to Saadiyat Island
Frieze debuts in Abu Dhabi with an 84-gallery roster, shifting focus from local development to transnational exchange ahead of its November launch.
An old circle at a crossroads, sharpened by British road engineering, became the way an Arabian city found its way and remembered itself — and it took the bulldozers to reveal it.
In a city where a landmark was more useful than an address, Doha's roundabouts became its navigation, its landscaping and its national image all at once. Now they're being torn out for signalled junctions — and the affection for them arrived, as one scholar put it, only posthumously.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
