1 gallery · 1 museum · 7 places
Al Jaddaf is home to two of Dubai's most significant cultural assets: Jameel Arts Centre, one of the UAE's leading contemporary art institutions, and the Jaddaf Waterfront Sculpture Park, the country's first permanent open-air sculpture park. Quieter and less finished than most of the city, with the dhow building yards that gave the area its name still visible alongside the cultural infrastructure that has arrived around them.
How a row of Al Quoz warehouses became the most serious address in Gulf contemporary art — and how to navigate its galleries, foundations and programme.
Alserkal Avenue sits in Al Quoz Industrial Area 1 — a grid of concrete warehouses and marble workshops wedged between Sheikh Zayed Road and Al Khail Road — and it is, improbably, the most culturally credible square kilometre in the Gulf.
On the art world's transparency problem, the extraordinary markets the world is only beginning to discover, and why we decided to build a map.
February 2026, Doha. Msheireb Downtown — the old business district that Qatar has been quietly transforming into something between a cultural quarter and an ur…
The rose rules Persian poetry and painting — but under the sweetness sits a thorn, a bleeding bird, and a national emblem quietly assembled out of Chinese, European and Persian parts. A history of gol o bolbol, from a medieval still to a Dubai gallery.
Gol o bolbol — the rose and the nightingale — is among the most beautiful images in a thousand years of Persian art, and in modern Persian it also means sweet, empty talk. Under the tile, the picture is darker: a bird singing in blood for a flower that will not answer and will not last.
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.
A seven-warehouse lifestyle hub combining food, wellness, retail and creative studios is set to open in Al Quoz Creative Zone by the end of 2026, adding a new anchor to the neighbourhood built around Alserkal Avenue.
CMPLX, a new warehouse-style lifestyle destination combining food, wellness, retail and creative studios, is set to open in Dubai's Al Quoz Creative Zone by the end of 2026 — adding a fresh anchor to a neighbourhood already defined by Alserkal Avenue's galleries and cultural spaces.
A village half-buried in sand an hour from Dubai, a name that means "she of the little sickle," and what Emirati sources actually say.
The houses at Al Madam went up around 1980 and stood empty by the mid-1990s. People will tell you she lives there — not in the old stories, though. That attachment is recent, and it is the interesting part.
