Sharjah

Flag Island

1 gallery · 0 museums · 0 places

About this district

A small island off the Sharjah waterfront, holding 1971 – Design Space, the emirate's dedicated contemporary design gallery. Graphic work, furniture, interactive design and new technologies, in a purpose-made space with the water on all sides. Compact, specific, and the only venue of its kind in the emirate.

Galleries

Museums

No published museums in this district yet.

Places

No published places in this district yet.

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

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

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.

A strand of natural Gulf pearls, the luxury export that built the Arabian Gulf before oil
Editorial

The Sea That Came Before the Oil: The History of the Pearl

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.