How the UAE Built a Global Art Hub From the Ground Up

BUILDING AN ARTISTIC NATION: HOW THE UAE CREATED A CULTURAL ECOSYSTEM THAT SHAPES THE WORLD

The year 2003 is where the story really begins. Long before Art Dubai launched in 2007, and well before international headlines proclaimed the Gulf a cultural powerhouse, a quieter transformation was already underway. That year, Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi was appointed to lead the Sharjah Biennial, a moment that multiple speakers at the 20th Global Art Forum identified as the turning point in the UAE’s artistic rise.

The Forum, held at Art Dubai in June 2026, opened with a conversation moderated by cultural theorist Shumon Basar. Joining him were four architects of the UAE’s cultural landscape: Antonia Carver, Director of Art Jameel; Sunny Rahbar, co-founder of The Third Line and Bidoun magazine; Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, founder of the Barjeel Art Foundation; and the broader network of institutions and individuals whose work quietly reshaped the nation’s artistic identity over two decades.

Rather than celebrating anniversaries, Basar steered the discussion toward a more fundamental question: what conditions made such rapid cultural transformation possible?

The answer challenged a common assumption about the Gulf’s artistic rise. Culture did not arrive alongside spectacular architecture. It came first, built through intellectual infrastructure rather than physical monuments.

Under Al Qasimi’s direction, the Sharjah Biennial evolved from a regional exhibition into one of the world’s most intellectually rigorous platforms for contemporary art, championing artists and curatorial practices from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East long before the Global South became central to international museum discourse. Sharjah Art Foundation grew alongside it, integrating publishing, artist residencies, film, music, performance, education, conservation and research into a single institutional mission. Today, Al Qasimi ranks among the world’s leading curators, having served as Artistic Director of Aichi Triennale 2025 and the 25th Biennale of Sydney in 2026, while topping ArtReview’s Power 100 in 2024.

The significance of Sharjah lay not simply in the exhibitions it presented but in the model it established: cultural institutions could generate knowledge rather than merely display objects.

Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi recalled growing up in Sharjah surrounded by libraries, theatre productions, public performances and book fairs. Recent archival discoveries revealing exhibitions held in Dubai during the 1960s reinforce this longer history, challenging narratives that suggest the country’s cultural life began only in the twenty-first century. History, the discussion suggested, rarely begins where anniversaries choose to start.

Antonia Carver’s perspective offered another dimension. Arriving in Dubai in 2001 after working in publishing in London, she encountered a city whose creative energy defied easy categorisation. Writers collaborated with architects. Journalists worked alongside artists. Film, theatre and literature intersected with emerging contemporary art practices in ways that dissolved conventional disciplinary boundaries. Rather than importing existing institutional models, practitioners responded organically to the opportunities around them, creating organisations that reflected the city’s rapidly evolving identity.

Sunny Rahbar’s recollections added crucial context. As co-founder of both Bidoun magazine and The Third Line, she helped shape Dubai’s independent cultural infrastructure from the ground up. If galleries provided spaces for artists, Bidoun provided a platform for ideas. At a time when narratives about the Middle East were largely being produced elsewhere, the magazine became one of the most influential voices documenting the region’s artists, writers and thinkers on their own terms. Meanwhile, The Third Line demonstrated that a commercial gallery could also function as a cultural institution, nurturing artists through long-term relationships, publications and public programmes rather than simply facilitating sales.

Collectively, these initiatives created something far more significant than the sum of individual organisations. They created trust. They built networks. They cultivated audiences. Most importantly, they demonstrated that culture is never the product of a single institution. It is the product of an ecosystem.

Art Dubai itself evolved into far more than an annual marketplace. From its earliest editions, the fair positioned itself as a platform where commerce and culture could coexist, recognising that healthy art markets depend on robust intellectual, educational and institutional foundations. The Global Art Forum, central to that vision, resisted becoming a conventional conference attached to an art fair. Instead, it developed into one of the region’s most respected platforms for interdisciplinary thinking, bringing together artists, architects, economists, scientists, technologists, philosophers and writers to examine the forces shaping contemporary society.

Rather than limiting activities to a single week each spring, Art Dubai steadily expanded into a year-round cultural institution. Through Art Dubai Projects, it commissioned ambitious public artworks, performances and site-specific installations that engage directly with Dubai’s urban environment. The Dubai Public Art Strategy, developed in partnership with Dubai Culture, seeks to integrate contemporary art into the city’s parks, waterfronts, public squares and neighbourhoods, transforming the urban landscape into an accessible, open-air cultural experience.

Education became equally central. Campus Art Dubai became one of the region’s most influential professional development programmes, nurturing emerging curators, writers and cultural practitioners from across the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. The A.R.M. Holding Children’s Programme introduced thousands of young people across the UAE to contemporary artistic practice through artist-led workshops and sustained creative engagement, investing not simply in future artists but in future audiences.

Carver’s work exemplifies this philosophy. Before becoming Director of Art Jameel, she played a formative role in shaping Art Dubai during its early years. Today, through Art Jameel, she oversees one of the region’s most influential independent arts organisations, whose work spans exhibitions, heritage, publishing, research, commissions and learning programmes across the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Jameel Arts Centre, which opened on Dubai Creek in 2018, functions as a space where exhibitions, libraries, educational programmes, artists’ gardens and research intersect, creating conditions through which artistic practice can be studied, debated and shared.

The conversation repeatedly returned to interconnectedness. No single institution, however influential, could have achieved what the UAE accomplished over two decades. Each organisation developed a distinct role within a much larger ecology. Art Dubai became a catalyst for international exchange and public engagement. Sharjah Art Foundation established a benchmark for curatorial research and long-term artistic commissioning. The Third Line demonstrated that commercial galleries can function as cultural institutions. Bidoun shaped intellectual discourse surrounding contemporary art from the Middle East and its diasporas, proving that publishing is itself a form of institution building.

The Barjeel Art Foundation illustrates how collecting can become an act of scholarship. Founded by Al Qassemi in Sharjah in 2010, Barjeel grew into one of the world’s foremost collections of modern and contemporary Arab art. Its purpose has always been to make Arab art visible, accessible and intellectually legible through exhibitions, publications, research and partnerships with museums and universities around the world. In doing so, Barjeel helped rewrite the narrative of modern Arab art, challenging its historical marginalisation within dominant art historical canons.

Collections hidden in storage remain private possessions; collections that are researched and shared become part of cultural memory. For regions across Africa and the Global South, this observation carries particular resonance. Many countries possess extraordinary artistic traditions and internationally celebrated artists, yet the infrastructure sustaining those histories often remains fragile. Archives are incomplete, publications are scarce, and important exhibitions disappear with little documentation. The Global Art Forum therefore offered more than reflection on the UAE. It presented a compelling case for why cultural ecosystems require long-term investment in knowledge production as much as in artistic production.

Abu Dhabi contributed another essential dimension. Through the Department of Culture and Tourism, Abu Dhabi invested in museums, heritage institutions, education and international partnerships that connect local histories with global audiences. Rather than competing, Dubai, Sharjah and Abu Dhabi cultivated distinct yet interconnected identities, each contributing to a national ecosystem whose influence extends far beyond the country’s borders.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the Forum conversation was its insistence that none of this was inevitable. Again and again, speakers returned to individuals who recognised absences and chose to respond. Publishers established magazines because critical discourse was lacking. Gallerists created spaces because artists needed representation. Collectors built foundations because histories were being overlooked. Curators established institutions because existing models no longer reflected regional realities.

The UAE’s cultural landscape has been built not by singular monuments but by collective acts of imagination. Museums, biennials and art fairs are visible expressions of decades of less visible work: conversations held around kitchen tables, independent publications produced with limited resources, artists supported before international recognition arrived, archives painstakingly assembled, educational programmes developed for future generations and partnerships sustained across institutions and emirates.

As cultural centres across Africa, Asia and Latin America continue to expand, the UAE offers an instructive example. Its success has not been built solely on ambitious architecture or significant financial investment, although both played important roles. Rather, it emerged through patient cultivation of relationships between artists, curators, publishers, educators, collectors, governments and independent organisations. The open question now is whether other regions, watching closely, will invest in the same slow, unglamorous groundwork before the architecture arrives.