The Gulf’s new museums
On the waves of the past or future?
MúzeumCafé 34.
Saadiyat Island, the Island of Happiness, in the dazzling, turquoise water of the Persian Gulf, is a 28 billion dollar development a few minutes drive from Abu Dhabi’s traditional city centre. The island, will have 30 hotels, 8,000 villas and a population of 125,000. Yet the 1.5 million visitors expected for 2018 are not to be drawn only by the promise of luxury and comfort but by its main attraction, a cultural district including the world’s leading brand-name museums. It intends to be the herald of a future Arabia famed for its vibrant artistic, intellectual and cultural life. An interesting change can be witnessed: the trend today is clearly indicating a marketing strategy guided by culture instead of the last decade’s fantasy world of luxury consumption and spectacular urban architecture. This concept increasingly reflects a world where traditional Arab and Muslim identities are boldly and proudly hosting a globalised and multicultural reality. This duality of being traditional and ethnically nationalist, as well as globalised and cosmopolitan is marked by the new cultural projects which speak about the past and hopes of the region in buildings, designed by internationally prominent architects, which are futuristic yet operating with traditional Arabian symbols. Similarly, the new museums in the region feature, on the one hand, institutions of national history and on the other, exhibitions which reinterpret what is local in terms of global cultural processes. As conceptualised by its Japanese curator, this year’s Sharjah Biennial bears the title of Re:emerge – Towards a New Cultural Cartography, suggesting a redrawing of the connections between the Arab world, Asia, Northern Africa and Latin America “in a period of global cultural change and realignment”, as Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi has put it.