Abu Dhabi

Al Maryah & Al Reem

0 galleries · 0 museums · 4 places

About this district

Two islands just off the eastern edge of the city, developed over the last fifteen years into a high-rise financial and residential quarter. The art here is public and corporate — plaza commissions, lobby collections, sculpture along the promenades — and you meet it while walking somewhere else.

Galleries

No published galleries in this district yet.

Museums

No published museums in this district yet.

A large landscaped roundabout in Doha, Qatar, with a monumental sculpture on its central island and multi-lane traffic circling it against a backdrop of West Bay towers.
Editorial

Why Doha Is Full of Roundabouts

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.

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

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

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.