1 gallery · 0 museums · 0 places
A residential district south of central Manama, notable as the birthplace of one of the country's pioneering artist-run galleries. Um Al Hassam is quiet residential streets, and its cultural significance is tied to Nadine Al Shaikh's first gallery, opened here in 2007. This is a district defined by a pioneering woman-led gallery rather than a dense art cluster. The register is grassroots and pioneering.
No published museums in this district yet.
No published places in this district yet.
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.
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.
Eight thousand years before the first barrel, the Gulf had already built a global economy — out of an oyster, a held breath, and a rope.
Before oil, the Arabian Gulf ran on the pearl: a global luxury trade that raised its cities from the sand, drew fortunes and real suffering in equal measure, and then vanished almost overnight. The story of the industry that made the modern Gulf — and the quiet way it is coming back.
