London’s Whitechapel Gallery has announced plans for an ambitious exhibition of Arab art, pulling more than 100 works from the Barjeel Art Foundation, and noted as “the broadest single overview of Arab art to be shown in the UK to date,” the Art Newspaper reports.  “The Barjeel foundation’s guiding principle is to contribute to the intellectual development of the art scene in the Arab region by building a prominent, publicly accessible art collection in the UAE,” the foundation said in a statement. (more…)

An article in The Economist charts the ongoing progress of The Louvre Abu Dubai, part of the Saadiyat Island Cultural District being built on a sandbar off the course of the U.A.E. city.  “It will be a museum of and for the world,” says Rita Aoun-Abdo, head of the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority. (more…)

Kader Attia, Repair, Culture’s Agency (2014), via Art Observed

In light of its subject matter, the New Museum wastes no time in describing the challenges ahead of Here and Elsewhere, its current exhibition focusing on contemporary Arabic and Middle Eastern art.  Taking its title from the 1976 Jean-Luc Godard documentary of the same name, the museum effectively poses the same questions that plagued Godard’s quasi-documentary on the Palestinian army.  Faced with an inability to complete his statement on the complex social issues and the subsequent defeat of Palestine in the Six Days War, Godard instead sought a middle ground between the embattled nation and his French homeland.  The film is spiked with cinema verité segments, abstract performance and experimental camerawork that ultimately places a considerable distance between the film and any sense of cohesive, authoritative statement. (more…)

The Guggenheim’s currently under construction space in Abu Dhabi is hosting a preview exhibition of its collection, showing 16 works in the exhibition  “Seeing Through Light: Selections From the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Collection” at Manarat later this year.  “It is small in nature because the space, a temporary exhibition gallery used to foster audience engagement for the three museums, is only about 15,000 square feet,” says Curator Susan Davidson. (more…)