Sharjah

Al Qasba

2 galleries · 0 museums · 0 places

About this district

A canal-side pedestrian district between the Al Khan and Khalid lagoons — two 150-metre blocks facing each other across the water — holding Maraya Art Centre and, on its second floor, the Barjeel Art Foundation. Three storeys and 1,500 square metres of exhibition space above the restaurants and the Eye of the Emirates wheel. One of the most serious collections of modern Arab art in the Gulf, in a leisure development.

Galleries

Museums

No published museums in this district yet.

Places

No published places in this district yet.

Editorial artwork inspired by Arab Modernism, featuring a stylised figure, Arabic calligraphy and abstract geometric elements symbolising the rediscovery of overlooked artists and cultural histories.
Editorial

Arab Modernism 101: The Movement That Western Art History Forgot

An entire century of extraordinary painting, sculpture and radical thinking got written out of the global canon. Someone made that decision. And now the market — and the collectors who pay attention — are making a different one.

Great art does not become invisible by accident. Arab Modernism reveals how museums, markets and cultural institutions shape what the world sees — and what it overlooks. A story about artists, recognition and the blind spots that define art history.

Abstract geometric composition of interlocking angular forms in layered planes of colour.
Editorial

Women of Arab Abstraction

The letter set loose, the line woven, the arabesque the West once threw away — and the women who built modern abstraction out of all three, then got written out of it.

Abstraction is usually told as a Western invention that arrived elsewhere late. Saloua Raouda Choucair, Etel Adnan, Madiha Umar and a room of others tell it differently — often as the only woman in the movement, building modern form from the geometry, craft and calligraphy their own culture already held.