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The Heart of Sharjah — the old city, restored quarter by quarter, holding Al Hisn fort, Calligraphy Square, Souq Al Arsah and a run of heritage houses turned into galleries and museums. Coral-stone walls, wind towers, shaded lanes between them. The oldest ground in the emirate and the densest concentration of things to walk into.
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What the world's most famous building stunt tells you about everything it was filmed on
A film crew drilled into the world's tallest building to hang a man off the side of it. Behind that decision sits wind physics, a hundred-year-old cooling technology, a height race Dubai has quietly stepped away from, and an art scene older than the tower.
How Hassan Sharif and the artists known as "the Five" built conceptual art in the UAE from nothing
Before the Louvre came to Abu Dhabi and Alserkal filled with galleries, a small group of artists made conceptual art in the UAE with almost no audience and a great deal of ridicule. This is the story of Hassan Sharif and the pioneers who built a scene from nothing — and why their work still anchors Emirati art today.
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.
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.
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.
Inside one of the Gulf's first dedicated art museums, the Western Orientalist pictures that once framed the East hang under the collection of the ruler who spent his life writing back against them
In one Sharjah gallery hang the Western pictures that once framed the East — assembled by the ruler who spent his life contesting them. A long read on who controls the image of a place.
