While Qatar and Abu Dhabi vie for the title of the Middle East’s art hub, there is a dusty corner of Dubai that has quietly created a scene of its own. That the area, Al Quoz, should find itself as a creative hub at all is something of a surprise.
This is part of Dubai you don’t see in the tourist brochures. The district, a few square kilometres in size, is home to cement factories, car showrooms and much of the city’s labouring population. Its streets are half-built and have numbers rather than names; growling cement trucks weave dangerously around unfinished roundabouts and grim worker’s accommodation lines the roads. When the wind picks up it carries the dust and the grit making it far from pleasant to venture outside.
Yet despite this, Al Quoz is the centre of a thriving art scene, one that – unusually for Dubai – is completely organic. While Abu Dhabi is bringing over big players such as the Louvre and the Guggenheim, Al Quoz is home to names you won’t recognise: the Third Line, b21, the Jam Jar, the Shelter; entities that are just as important when it comes to creating a viable, sustainable arts scene in Dubai.
One of the first to see the potential in the area was Sunny Rahbar, the co-owner of The Third Line. An Iranian who grew up in Dubai, she, like other ‘Dubai kids’ studied abroad. When she returned to the emirate she and her friends realised that it wasn’t as cool as they thought.
‘There was a cluster of us who studied abroad all over the world and when we got back to Dubai, we began talking about how it would be cool if Dubai had this and that.’ Some got into music, some into publishing. Rahbar, who had experience in the arts, opened a space in Al Quoz. ‘Instead of just talking about it, we did something,’ she says. ‘Then other people started popping up who felt the same way, which was something we weren’t aware of, and slowly a scene started to grow.’
Comments are closed.