2 galleries · 1 museum · 0 places
The campus district on Sharjah International Airport Road, about ten kilometres from the centre, holding the House of Wisdom and the College of Fine Arts and Design galleries. Landscaped grounds, a thirty-six-metre sculpture at the entrance, and a library that works as a public cultural centre rather than a reading room. Free, quiet, and built for spending a day in.
No published places in this district yet.
Exploring concealment, materiality, and memory in new triptychs
A review of the artist's latest survey, examining how layered wax and pigment transform painting into a site of quiet resistance.
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.
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.
