Abu Dhabi

Al Ain Heritage

0 galleries · 6 museums · 1 place

About this district

Al Ain Heritage quarter, in Exhibo's map, covers the garden city's museums, forts, and arts centres — an oasis counterpoint to coastal Abu Dhabi.

Galleries

No published galleries in this district yet.

Museums

Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial Returns to the Capital This Autumn

Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial Returns to the Capital This Autumn

The second edition of the emirate-wide public art event opens in Al Ain in October and Abu Dhabi in November, led by former MACBA director Elvira Dyangani Ose under the theme "Home: A Glossary for a Communal Sense of Place."

The second edition of the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial opens in Al Ain on 23 October 2026 and in the capital on 15 November, running into February 2027. Curated by former MACBA director Elvira Dyangani Ose under the theme "Home: A Glossary for a Communal Sense of Place," the free, citywide programme builds on the acclaimed inaugural edition, several of whose works have since become permanent public installations.

A robed, veiled crowd gathered in a red desert landscape in the style of a science-fiction epic — the visual vocabulary Hollywood reuses to signal an alien world.
Editorial

Why Every Sci-Fi Desert Looks Arab

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.

Red sandstone inselbergs rising from the iron-stained valley floor of Wadi Rum, southern Jordan — the desert used as a stand-in for Mars in The Martian and other films.
Editorial

Why Wadi Rum Keeps Playing Mars: A Desert That Is Right About the Wrong Planet

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.