UAE's Art Market Surge: How One Curator's Vision Built a Billion-Dollar Ecosystem

Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi’s appointment to lead the Sharjah Biennial in 2003 is where many participants in the 20th Global Art Forum locate the real beginning of the UAE’s cultural transformation. Not the gleaming museums. Not the international art fair. A curatorial decision, made years before international headlines caught up.

That forum, presented as part of Art Dubai and moderated by writer and cultural theorist Shumon Basar, brought together Antonia Carver, Director of Art Jameel; Sunny Rahbar, co-founder of The Third Line and Bidoun magazine; and Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, founder of the Sharjah-based Barjeel Art Foundation. Their conversation looked backward, tracing the people, institutions and moments that quietly built one of the world’s most consequential art ecosystems over two decades.

Additional reference context is available at https://artafricamagazine.org/building-a-cultural-nation-how-the-uae-created-one-of-the-worlds-most-dynamic-art-ecosystems/.

The discussion challenged a persistent misconception: that contemporary art arrived in the Gulf alongside spectacular architecture. The speakers pushed back on this repeatedly. Culture came first.

Under Hoor Al Qasimi’s direction, the Sharjah Biennial was transformed from a regional exhibition into one of the world’s most intellectually rigorous platforms for contemporary art, championing artists and curatorial practices from across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East long before the Global South became central to international museum discourse. That transformation extended well beyond the Biennial itself. Sharjah Art Foundation, under her leadership, grew to encompass publishing, artist residencies, film, music, performance, education, conservation and research, becoming a year-round institution whose influence reaches far beyond any single exhibition cycle. Today, Hoor Al Qasimi ranks among the world’s leading curators, having served as Artistic Director of Aichi Triennale 2025 and the 25th Biennale of Sydney (2026), and topping ArtReview’s Power 100 in 2024. The model Sharjah established matters as much as its output: cultural institutions could generate knowledge rather than merely display objects.

Antonia Carver’s reflections offered a different vantage point. Arriving in Dubai in 2001 after working in publishing in London, she encountered a city whose creative energy resisted 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. Practitioners responded organically to the city around them, building organisations that reflected Dubai’s own rapidly evolving identity rather than importing institutional models from elsewhere.

Sunny Rahbar’s account added another layer. 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 built something larger than any single organisation: trust, networks, audiences, and proof that culture is the product of an ecosystem, not a single institution.

Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi recalled growing up in Sharjah surrounded by libraries, theatre productions, public performances and book fairs, reminding the audience that the UAE’s artistic history extends well beyond the institutions now most familiar to international audiences. Recent archival discoveries revealing exhibitions held in Dubai during the 1960s reinforce this longer history, challenging simplistic narratives that place the country’s cultural life entirely within the twenty-first century. History rarely begins where anniversaries choose to start.

Art Dubai itself illustrates how a fair can evolve into something more ambitious than an annual marketplace. Undoubtedly one of the world’s leading commercial fairs, connecting galleries from the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and beyond with international collectors and institutions, its significance cannot be understood through sales figures alone. 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 has been central to that vision since its inception, developing into one of the region’s most respected platforms for interdisciplinary thinking. Art Dubai has also expanded steadily into a year-round cultural institution through Art Dubai Projects, commissioning 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, goes further still, integrating contemporary art into the city’s parks, waterfronts, public squares and neighbourhoods. Artists here are positioned as active participants in shaping the city’s identity, not providers of civic decoration.

Education has received sustained investment alongside these public programmes. Campus Art Dubai has become one of the region’s most influential professional development programmes for emerging curators, writers and cultural practitioners from across the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. The A.R.M. Holding Children’s Programme introduces thousands of young people across the UAE to contemporary artistic practice through artist-led workshops, investing in future audiences as much as future artists.

Carver’s current work through Art Jameel 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. Like Sharjah Art Foundation, its success lies in creating conditions through which artistic practice can be studied, debated and shared, not simply presented.

The Barjeel Art Foundation, founded by Al Qassemi in Sharjah in 2010, illustrates how collecting can become an act of scholarship. One of the world’s foremost collections of modern and contemporary Arab art, Barjeel was never conceived simply as a repository. Its purpose has always been to make Arab art visible, accessible and intellectually legible through exhibitions, publications, research and partnerships with museums and universities worldwide, helping rewrite the narrative of modern Arab art and challenging its historical marginalisation within dominant art historical canons.

Throughout the conversation, collecting was discussed not as an end in itself but as a responsibility. Works of art achieve their fullest significance only when they enter public life through exhibitions, catalogues, archives and critical writing. Collections hidden in storage remain private possessions; collections that are researched and shared become part of cultural memory. For many countries with extraordinary artistic traditions and internationally celebrated artists, the infrastructure sustaining those histories remains fragile: archives incomplete, publications scarce, important exhibitions underdocumented. The Global Art Forum offered more than a reflection on the UAE. It made a compelling case for why cultural ecosystems require long-term investment in knowledge production as much as in artistic production.

The question the forum left open is whether the model is transferable, and who, beyond the UAE, is prepared to make that investment.