0 galleries · 0 museums · 6 places
The eastern approach to Abu Dhabi island, where the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque stands raised above the road between the Musaffah and Maqta bridges — 82 domes, four minarets at 104 metres, a courtyard of floral marble inlay, and the largest hand-knotted carpet in the world inside. Visible from every direction on the way in, which was the intention. Free to enter, and busiest at dusk.
No published galleries in this district yet.
No published museums in this district yet.
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.
