Hudayriyat & Al Bateen MarinaAbu Dhabi
Tolerance by Eduardo Kobra
Two thousand square metres of kaleidoscopic portraiture wrapped around a building — the largest mural in the region.
Tolerance — Tolerancia — is a mural by the Brazilian artist Eduardo Kobra at Marsa Al Bateen marina, unveiled on 21 December 2019. At more than 2,000 square metres and 14 metres high, wrapping one of the district's buildings, it was described at unveiling as the largest public mural of its kind in the region, and remains among the largest works in Kobra's own body of thousands of murals across more than 40 countries.
It was commissioned by Abu Dhabi's Department of Municipalities and Transport as the first artwork in the 'For Abu Dhabi' initiative, part of the wider Ghadan 21 programme — a city-wide activation intended to create contemporary artistic landmarks across the capital and the start of a sequence of commissions that later brought Elian Chali, MadC, Tarsila Schubert and others to the city's walls.
The work carries Kobra's signature idiom: kaleidoscopic colour, harlequin patterning and larger-than-life portraiture, with half-portraits set side by side. The faces are of real people living in Abu Dhabi, drawn from an earlier Department of Community Development campaign called This Is Abu Dhabi, which had photographed residents of different backgrounds, ethnicities and ages in black and white. Kobra saw the campaign online and found it aligned with his own long-running preoccupations. Made for the UAE's Year of Tolerance, the mural sets out to embody diversity, respect and peace between cultures.
Kobra spent close to a month in the capital, with the painting itself taking almost four weeks on the ground alongside two assistants. His process involves extended planning around the host building's structure before any paint is applied.
The mural is on a building at a publicly accessible marina and can be viewed free at any hour.
Exhibo editorial
The faces are of people who live here. Not celebrities, not archetypes — actual Abu Dhabi residents, photographed in black and white for a government campaign about who the city's population actually is, then handed to a Brazilian who paints in kaleidoscope.
That transfer is what makes it more interesting than its own statistics. Kobra's style is enormously recognisable and, frankly, applies the same visual treatment to Gandhi in São Paulo and to a nurse in New York; the risk with a commission like this is that Abu Dhabi becomes another surface for a house style. What stops it is the source material. He did not invent these faces or select them for photogenic diversity — he inherited them from a campaign that had already done the difficult part. So the mural is a portrait of a specific population rendered by someone who paints strangers for a living, and at fourteen metres you can stand underneath a half-face and work out that its owner is probably somewhere within a few kilometres.
How to find it
At Marsa Al Bateen marina on Arabian Gulf Street in the Al Bateen district, on the western side of Abu Dhabi island. The mural wraps a building within the marina complex and is visible from the promenade — walk the waterfront rather than approaching from the car park, as the full 14-metre height only reads from a distance. The marina promenade also has cafés and restaurants and is a well-known sunset spot. Free to view at any hour; go in the late afternoon when low sun brings out the colour.
Similar places
All places
Related stories
The Universal Museum, Rebuilt on Arab Soil
How Abu Dhabi took one of the West's most contested ideas — the museum that claims to hold all of humanity — and moved the question of who gets to frame the world
A portolan chart in the floor, three ewers without a hierarchy, and a $450-million Leonardo no one has seen since it was bought. The Louvre Abu Dhabi is a French–Emirati experiment in what the universal museum becomes when it is rebuilt from a different centre — and whether that moves the centre, or merely moves the Louvre, is the question the building leaves open.
The Animal We Drew Everywhere Once It Was Gone
From Neolithic rock to airline tailfin — how the Arabian oryx vanished from the desert, came back from nine animals, and multiplied everywhere as a symbol in the very decades it was gone.
The last wild Arabian oryx was shot in 1972. By then it was already a picture — carved on Bronze Age tombs, mistaken by the ancients for a unicorn, praised by poets as the eyes of the beloved. This is the story of an animal that went extinct in the wild and was brought back from nine survivors, and of the strange gap between the creature and the emblem it became: fast, sharp and ascendant on a nation's tailfin, while the animal itself survives by standing still in the shade.
Valerie Hillings Appointed Inaugural Director of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi
The former NCMA chief returns to the capital to shape the Saadiyat Island venue's debut year and curatorial strategy
Valerie Hillings has been named the founding director of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, marking a significant leadership shift ahead of the island campus's December inauguration.