Abu Dhabi

Al Bateen & Al Khalidiya

13 galleries · 0 museums · 3 places

About this district

Al Bateen and Al Khalidiya are Abu Dhabi's established residential gallery belt — villa showrooms and ground-floor spaces along Corniche-adjacent streets favoured by local collectors.

Galleries

Museums

No published museums in this district yet.

AlUla: How the Desert Became a Contemporary Art Destination
Editorial

AlUla: How the Desert Became a Contemporary Art Destination

A comprehensive guide to Saudi Arabia's desert art revolution, mapping the permanent and temporary masterworks of the AlUla oasis.

Discover how AlUla transformed from an ancient trade route into a leading destination for contemporary land art. Explore the curatorial vision behind Desert X 2026, the permanent monumentality of Wadi AlFann, and the upcoming Contemporary Art Museum partnered with Paris's Centre Pompidou.

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.

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

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.