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Abu Dhabi

Yas Island

0 galleries · 0 museums · 8 places

About this district

Exhibo editorial

The leisure island — Ferrari World, Warner Bros. World, Yas Waterworld, the Yas Marina Circuit and Etihad Arena. Immersive, large-scale and built for families, with architecture that photographs as well as anything in the emirate.

Galleries

No published galleries in this district yet.

Museums

No published museums in this district yet.

Places

All places in Abu Dhabi
Aldar Headquarters (The Coin Building) — place

Aldar Headquarters (The Coin Building)

A 121-metre glass disc standing on its edge — the Middle East's first circular skyscraper, and its most-photographed silhouette.

Abu Dhabi

Etihad Arena — place

Etihad Arena

A woven gold shell on the Yas Bay waterfront — shade by day, lantern by night, 18,000 seats inside.

Abu Dhabi

Flower Parent and Child by Takashi Murakami — place

Flower Parent and Child by Takashi Murakami

Ten metres of gold leaf and grinning flowers on the waterfront — one of Murakami's largest works anywhere.

Abu Dhabi

Jubail Mangrove Park Boardwalk — place

Jubail Mangrove Park Boardwalk

2.6 kilometres of timber walkway threaded through grey mangroves on stilts — with a net you can lie on above the water.

Abu Dhabi

Masdar City Central Park Camel Sculpture — place

Masdar City Central Park Camel Sculpture

A camel in twisted metal with an impossibly stretched middle, standing in a solar-powered park.

Abu Dhabi

The Emerging Man (The Giant) — place

The Emerging Man (The Giant)

An eight-metre head and two vast hands surfacing out of the Gulf, as though something enormous is climbing out.

Abu Dhabi

The Humans by Fatspatrol — place

The Humans by Fatspatrol

A hundred metres of black-and-white figures in profile — dreamers, visionaries and jokers on a nightclub wall.

Abu Dhabi

Yas Bay Waterfront Art Trail — place

Yas Bay Waterfront Art Trail

Twelve works along one promenade — Murakami, KAWS, four astronaut cats and a row of painted electrical substations.

Abu Dhabi

Stories

All articles
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

Tunis · Tunisia

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

Amman · Jordan

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

Abu Dhabi · United Arab Emirates

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.

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

Doha · Qatar

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.