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Sharjah

Al Qasba

2 galleries · 0 museums · 0 places

About this district

Exhibo editorial

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.

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A deep cobalt-blue Ilkhanid ceramic bowl decorated with white, red, and cut gold-leaf ornament, its glaze imitating the color of lapis lazuli.
Editorial

Tehran · Iran

Why Disney Made the Genie Blue

The long material and colonial history behind the most recognizable blue body in popular culture.

Almost everyone remembers that Disney's genie is blue. Fewer ask why. The answer runs backward through five thousand years — Egyptian blue standing in for lapis, cobalt on a Mongol palace, the eye that guards against envy, the last color most languages learned to name, and a layout artist photographing Isfahan just before a war — to a color that was rarely, in this part of the world, quite what it claimed to be.

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.

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

Beirut · Lebanon

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.