Latest articles from Exhibo: city guides, market reports, gallery news, and art world coverage across Dubai, London, New York, and global hubs.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
How conservators keep video, film, software and installation playback working as tapes fail and display equipment goes out of production
Tate, MoMA, the Guggenheim and the Met keep video, film and software playable: they document artist intent, migrate analogue signals and decide which decks stay dedicated to the work. This guide covers formats, ingest, Variable Media strategies, how the specialism formed, and current costs for museums.
How museums slow collection damage with climate, pests and risk, using sourced ranges rather than a single 50% RH target
Staff keep collections usable by managing climate, pests, storage and risk at room scale. This guide sets out ICOM-CC and AIC definitions, CCI’s ten agents of deterioration, and museum humidity, temperature and light bands with their source caveats. It covers risk ranking, historic-house limits, monitoring costs and when to hire a specialist.
Nine public disputes, chosen for a named conservation reason: overcleaning, amateur work, reconstruction ethics or missing records
Restoration fights are arguments about what a treatment removed, added or failed to record. This list sets selection criteria first, then walks nine documented cases from the Sistine Chapel and the National Gallery to Borja, Angkor Wat and Tutankhamun’s mask, with dates and 2026 locations checked against institutional sources.
How carbon-14, pigment first-use dates and tree rings date a painting, and why those laboratory results still cannot name the artist
A date on a painting is a date on a material: flax in the canvas, oil in the binder, a growth ring in a panel, a pigment that did not exist before a given year. This guide covers radiocarbon including the bomb peak, pigment terminus post quem, dendrochronology and lead isotopes, then the failure modes that keep a calendar from proving authorship.
Linseed oil, aged varnish, dirt and unstable pigments each yellow or darken a picture, and cleaning reverses only some of those changes
Old pictures look brown for mixed reasons: soot, oxidised varnish, yellowed linseed oil, and pigments that have changed in the film. Conservators can lift dirt and later varnish in many cases. They cannot restore copper greens gone brown or lead white turned transparent. The chemistry, the history of noticing it, and the limits of treatment.
How infrared reflectography, IR photography, X-radiography and MA-XRF record underdrawings, paint structure and elemental maps
Carbon drawing absorbs infrared; lead white blocks X-rays; calcium and mercury light up on elemental maps. This guide sets infrared reflectography beside IR photography, X-radiography and MA-XRF: physics, a study protocol, the people who built the kit, and campaigns at the NGA, Rijksmuseum, Getty and Met.
The Belgian artist discusses hybrid creatures, ancient mythology and the philosophy of interdependence behind his new sculptural project
At Palazzo Rota Ivancich, Koen Vanmechelen presents over 40 new works that challenge humanity's illusions of supremacy through taxidermy, bronze and cross-cultural mythological references.
As temperatures soar across the continent, a stark divide has emerged between institutions that can keep cool and those left sweating
A record-breaking heatwave has exposed how unprepared many European museums are for climate extremes, with smaller institutions forced to close rooms while larger ones become de facto cooling centres.
This guide is the honest version of what it takes.
Opening a gallery in Dubai is easier to license and harder to sustain than most people expect. Here is the honest version — what the licence really costs, where to set up, how the consignment model works, what customs and the freeport change, and the market reality you are walking into in 2026.
A practical 2026 guide to how art galleries earn press coverage
Press coverage no longer means a critic walking through your door. In 2026 it means a press release that journalists, search engines and AI answer engines can all read — and a clear plan for getting it in front of the right people. Here is how galleries earn coverage that keeps working long after the opening.
Photographer and filmmaker says departure was pre-planned, as succession process begins ahead of July AGM
Misan Harriman will leave his role as chair of London's Southbank Centre after two terms, with the venue confirming succession planning is already underway.
The Canadian Museum for Human Rights presents a nuanced exploration of displacement, memory and cultural resilience despite fierce opposition
Opening tomorrow at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Palestine Uprooted foregrounds Palestinian voices through poetry, embroidery, memory boxes and contemporary art — all while navigating unprecedented controversy.
For the first time, the 17th edition will be selected through an open international call rather than closed recommendations.
The Gwangju Biennale Foundation is inviting curators worldwide to apply for the artistic directorship of its 2028 edition, replacing its long-standing recommendation-based appointment system with a fully open process.
The city’s oldest library has expanded its stacks, added member spaces and opened a conservation lab while staying open throughout the works.
The New York Society Library has completed its most extensive building-wide renovation since the 1980s, expanding stacks, creating a conservation lab and adding study and events space within its 1937 Italianate townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
Most gallery profiles fail in the same few ways. Here is what separates the ones collectors trust from the ones they scroll past — and a checklist to fix yours in an afternoon.
A collector lands on your profile. They have maybe twenty seconds before they decide whether you are a serious gallery worth an inquiry or a half-finished listing to scroll past. Most of that decision is made before they have read a single word properly — it is made on whether the page looks complete, current, and like someone is actually behind it.
Collectors now start with a search bar — increasingly, an AI one — long before they reach a gallery door. A practical guide to how discovery actually works now, and what a gallery can do about it.
The journey to a gallery almost never begins at its door any more. It begins in a search field — someone typing "contemporary art gallery Dubai", "buy abstract sculpture", or the name of an artist they read about — and, increasingly, it begins inside an AI assistant that answers the question directly without ever showing a list of links. For galleries, this is both an opportunity and a quiet threat.
Treasure House Fair, Studiolo and Classic Art London bring renewed momentum to a shifting capital
Amid a sweltering June, London's art scene is staging a quiet resurgence driven by homegrown initiatives rather than international mega-fairs.
A sprawling exhibition of wobbling robots, sound installations and participatory workshops explores what it means to welcome the stranger
Running from June 2026 to May 2027, SeMA Buk-Seoul presents Kwon Byungjun's ambitious project using robots and sound to question how we encounter difference and build a shared sense of 'we'.
