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Building Sharjah
Building Sharjah reveals how modern architecture unfurled across the United Arab Emirates’ third-largest city. An oil discovery in 1972 positioned Sharjah as one of the world’s final cities shaped by transformative fortune. In the footsteps of Kuwait, Riyadh, and Dubai, Sharjah faced a metamorphosis: either one that repeated the past’s mistakes or one that reimagined how wealth can build a city. Sharjah’s potential enticed an international cast of experts to create a bold, new city. As their projects begin to vanish, this book preserves them through unseen photographs and recovered documents. New writing chronicles how local and arriving residents arranged the designed, concrete environment into a home. Beyond just a local artifact, this book examines the confident promises made by global practices of urbanization.
Urban Modernity in the Contemporary Gulf
"Urban Modernity in the Contemporary Gulf offers a timely and engaging discussion on architectural production in the modernization era in the Arabian Peninsula. Focusing on the 20th century as a starting point, the book explores the display of transnational architectural practices resulting in different notions of locality, cosmopolitanism and modernity. Contextually, with an eye on the present, the book reflects on the initiatives that recently re-engaged with the once ville moderne which, meanwhile, lost its pivotal function and meaning. A city within a bigger city, the urban fabric produced during the modernization era has the potential to narrate the social growth, East-West dynamics, an...
Imperfect Chronology
Celebrating the Barjeel Art Foundation's expansive collection, this book maps a genealogy of modern and contemporary Arab art and offers one of the most extensive presentations of modern Arab art. Based in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, the Barjeel Art Foundation was established to contribute to the development of the evolving art scene in the Arab region by building a prominent, publicly accessible art collection in the UAE. Over time it has grown to become one of the most holistic collections of Arab art, fostering critical dialogue around art practices both in the region and internationally. Coinciding with a year long series of exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, this unique ...
Taking Shape
"Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s-1980s explores the development of abstraction in the Arab world via paintings, sculpture, and works on paper dating from the 1950s through the 1980s. By looking critically at the history and historiography of mid-20th century abstraction, the exhibition considers art from North Africa and West Asia as integral to the discourse on global modernism. At its heart, the project raises a fundamental art historical question: How do we study abstraction across different contexts and what models of analysis do we use? Examining how and why artists investigated the expressive capacities of line, color, and texture, Taking Shape highlights a number of abstract movements that developed in the Middle East, North Africa, and West Asia, as well as the Arab diaspora."--Artsy website (accessed 18/2/20).
The Call
Everyone talks about "Saudi money," but no one really knows what it is. Journalist Krithika Varagur, a longtime chronicler of religion and politics, tells the story of Saudi influence as it has never been told before, in a book reported across the breadth of the Muslim world, from Nigeria to Indonesia to Kosovo. The Call connects the dots on Saudi Arabia's campaign to propagate its brand of ultraconservative Islam worldwide after it became oil-rich in the 20th century. Varagur visits diverse outposts of its influence, from a Saudi university in Jakarta to a beleaguered Shi'a movement in Nigeria. She finds that the campaign has had remarkably broad and sometimes uniform effects, from the into...
Expo 2020 Dubai
Artists explore themes of vision and cognition for the global expo Works by Hamra Abbas, Asma Belhamar, Afra al Dhaheri, Olafur Eliasson, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Shaikha al Mazrou, Monira al Qadiri, Khalil Rabah, Abdullah al Saadi, Yinka Shonibare and Haegue Yang respond to the Arab scholar Ibn al Haytham's 1021 text The Book of Optics.
Goodbye, World!
A look at how the internet and post-millenial technologies have transformed our ways of seeing and birthed a new form of culture. The way we see the world has changed drastically since NASA released the “blue marble” image of the earth taken by Apollo 17 in 1972. No longer a placid slow-moving orb, the world is now perceived as a hothouse of activity and hyper-connectivity that cannot keep up with its inhabitants. The internet has collectively bound human society, replacing the world as the network of all networks. In Goodbye, World! Looking at Art in the Digital Age, writer and curator Omar Kholeif traces the birth of a culture propagated but also consumed by this digitized network. Has...
Arabic Hurufiyya
Arab Hurufiya: Art and Identity is a book, which recollects the history of a modern art movement in the Arab world, called "Hurufiya". Re-inventing calligraphy, and focusing on the formal elements of the Arabic letter, it is one of the most significant art movements that took place in the Arab world beginning in the 14th century, and peaking again in mid-twentieth century. This movement fuses the traditional and the contemporary, the letter and the sign, in a way that the letter is perceived as an artistic form and does not require to be read or decrypted. Written by Dr. Charbel Dagher in 1991, this is the first time that these texts are published in English, and are accessible to a non-Arabic speaking audience.
The Gulf
On Saadiyat Island, just off the coast of Abu Dhabi, branches of iconic cultural institutions, including the Louvre, the Guggenheim, the British Museum and New York University, are taking shape to the designs of starchitects such as Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Zaha Hadid, and Norman Foster. In this way, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) seeks to burnish its reputation as a sophisticated destination for wealthy visitors and residents. Beneath the glossy veneer of the Saadiyat real estate plan, however, lies a tawdry reality. Those laboring on the construction sites are migrant workers who arrive from poor countries heavily indebted as a result of recruitment and transit fees. Once in the UAE the s...
Master of the Game
A perceptive and provocative history of Henry Kissinger's diplomatic negotiations in the Middle East that illuminates the unique challenges and barriers Kissinger and his successors have faced in their attempts to broker peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. “A wealth of lessons for today, not only about the challenges in that region but also about the art of diplomacy . . . the drama, dazzling maneuvers, and grand strategic vision.”—Walter Isaacson, author of The Code Breaker More than twenty years have elapsed since the United States last brokered a peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians. In that time, three presidents have tried and failed. Martin Indyk—a for...
