Gulf's Boldest Vision: $136M Museum Bets Big on Future-Forward Architecture

A 136-million-dollar torus rising over Dubai’s skyline, clad in more than a thousand individually molded stainless steel, fiberglass, and carbon-fiber panels, the Museum of the Future opened in 2022 as one of the most capital-intensive architectural statements in the Gulf’s recent history. Each panel was designed with 3-D modeling software and fabricated by computer-driven machinery from a local Emirati company, embedding domestic industrial capacity into what is, at its core, a sovereign branding exercise. Five floors of interactive exhibits invite visitors to imagine Earth in 2071, the centennial of the UAE’s founding. The tour descends from the OSS Hope space station through the HEAL Institute, featuring a digitally recreated Amazon rainforest and a DNA library of 2,400 specimens, before reaching the second floor’s “Tomorrow Today” exhibit: over 50 tech products, extant and prototypical, from autonomous vehicles to jetpacks to robot falcons, each purporting to address future challenges in agriculture, irrigation, food security, and waste management.

This structure embodies a paradoxical temporality central to what scholars call Gulf Futurism. The phrase emerged over a decade ago when American-Qatari artist Sophia Al-Maria and Kuwaiti composer Fatima Al Qadiri employed it in two intertwined but dissonant senses. The first describes the unfathomably rapid, oil-driven modernization of the Persian Gulf region, where in a single generation Dubai transformed from a fishing port into a high-rise megacity and global financial hub. Bedouins became bureaucrats; camels became cars; tents became towers. On this understanding, Gulf Futurism encompasses the Burj Khalifa, the Palm Jumeirah, the Mall of the Emirates, the Mars probe Hope, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, and the Vision 2030 plans announced by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE.

The second sense is aesthetic and critical. It names an artistic tendency reckoning with the existential fallout of rapid “Dubai-ification,” marked by spiraling proliferation of megamalls, megacities, mega-everything. To the extent that Gulf Futurism is a coherent art movement, it is associated with the GCC, an art collective founded in 2013 that deliberately confuses its name with that of the Gulf Cooperation Council, the political and economic consortium of six Gulf states established in 1981 and comprising Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman. The GCC art collective is a “delegation” of nine Gulf artists whose exact identities have varied over the years. Al-Maria and Al Qadiri were among its founding members. Unlike its intergovernmental counterpart, the art collective’s name functions as “an image, like a .jpeg file,” not an acronym. This naming strategy encapsulates the collective’s critical project: the aesthetic of Gulf Futurism innovated by the GCC is fundamentally parodic, parasitic on and subversive of the self-presentation of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

The GCC collective seeks to uncover state self-mythologizing as “a kind of ridiculous theatre, rituals with no real meaning.” In its critique of state as brand and government as corporation, the GCC mimics the uncanny vernacular produced by the intersection of indigenous tribal structures with late global capitalism: “the language of PR, the language of selling real estate, language of selling leisure and lifestyle options, the language of the performance rather than reality of labor.” Gulf Futurism, as interpreted by the GCC, represents Gulf hyperreality, a simulacrum of a simulacrum. Across exhibits in New York, London, Kuwait, Berlin, Beijing, Copenhagen, and Dubai, the collective has attempted to reflect and refract the breakneck accelerationism and New Age positive-thinking that have become the definitive modes of Gulf politics and culture.

The GCC describes its artistic project as “a kind of positive realism,” but it is ultimately ironic and cynical, much closer to an aesthetics of capitalist realism than to the blistering optimism of Italian Futurism. Gulf Futurism, as understood by the GCC art collective, describes a future that is already present as environmental disaster and consumerist dystopia. Sophia Al-Maria’s 2016 solo exhibition in the United States, titled Black Friday, articulates this pessimistic, capitalist realist register through video-based installations depicting a “mall in limbo,” with “automated walkways that appear to go both up and down but lead nowhere, neither to heaven nor to hell,” while the narrator speaks of a dream that is a nightmare and an “apocalypse that is already here.”

Yet even the GCC understands that Gulf non-Futurism maintains a relationship, however tenuous, with the future. The collective registered shock at the deployment of Peninsula Shield, the GCC’s military, to suppress 2011 protests in Bahrain. As one member reflected: “Everyone knows that it’s a show union, not a real union. Then it became so real.” This moment suggested the real-world power of belief. By producing regionalist pop songs and media productions, the GCC had become “reality for a lot of people.” The collective’s 2017 Basel exhibition, “Belief in the Power of Believe,” was truer than its creators may have known. Its meditation on Gulf governments’ co-option of “positive energy movements” as state policy, while clearly satirical and critical, reads better as documentary. “Belief in the power of believe” is indeed state policy, not merely a cynical tool of legitimation and depoliticization. It is, in all seriousness and sincerity, the official strategy by which Gulf states intend to bring forward the future.

The Museum of the Future announces an impossible temporality through a poem adorning its exterior as oversized calligraphy: “The future will be for those who will be able to imagine, design and build it, the future does not wait, the future can be designed and built today.” This “Tomorrow Today” temporality is true of the museum as a whole. The future ceases to be “the future”; it cannibalizes time itself, such that the UAE has been in the future “all along,” even “before,” when the region was inhabited by desert-dwelling, robe-wearing, falcon-racing tribesmen. The endurance of such traditions, even if only as aesthetic affects or tourist traps or robot falcons, distinguishes this future as specifically Emirati. A politics of the future reifies the nation more effectively than a politics of nostalgia ever could. The invention of the national future always doubles as an invention of the national past. The Museum of the Future is set in 2071 precisely because it is the centennial of the UAE’s founding, tying scientific breakthroughs and technological innovations to specifically Emirati history.

The conceptual contradiction of a museum of the future conveys this forever temporality well. The premise is a form of time travel: it memorializes the future that has yet to happen, casting the future as past. This is a museum that has arrived from somewhere else, from another time, yet its thrill comes from its contemporaneity, from its present possibility, from its now-ness. The superposition is the point. This is the time of Gulf Futurism: a time of quantum.

That the future already realized and being realized by the UAE is culturally authentic is evidently of great concern to the royal family, given that its futurism is another name for nationalism. The UAE’s rulers are not oblivious to contradictions flagged by the GCC art collective: that so much of the Gulf states’ futuristic aesthetic seems lifted wholesale from abroad, from the iconography of Hollywood blockbusters and Western science fiction, with a local accent somewhere between accidental and incidental. If the GCC’s critique was Gulf Futurism, the UAE’s response is Emirati Futurism: “A cultural, aesthetic and philosophical effort to explore the intersection of Emirati heritage with high technology, futuristic concepts and science fiction themes.” So went the announcement of the Emirati Futurism Award in 2021, a national design competition patronized by Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s Dubai Culture and Arts Authority and the Dubai Future Foundation. “The UAE has a rich heritage and tradition,” the announcement stated. “But our images of the future look like they come from somewhere else.” The award invites anyone living in the UAE to share their interpretation of what an original Emirati future might look like. The mere envisioning of this future is taken as how it will be realized.

The Emirati Futurism Award was given to 21 winners across seven categories, including architecture and urbanism, fashion and jewelry, product and industrial design, photography and graphic design, music and performing arts, the fine arts, and film and animation. The award announcement singles out the last category as “one of the most difficult and powerful” in the competition, reflecting growing Emirati interest in building a domestic animation industry.

The UAE has long been a major player in Arab animation, with Emirati animated comedies Shaabiat Al-Cartoon and Freej serving as staples of regional Ramadan programming for nearly 20 years. More significant is the Dubai-based children’s channel SpaceToon, on air since 2000 with an international audience exceeding 130 million viewers. SpaceToon arguably represents a nascent form of techno-philia and science fiction imaginary that would become pillars of Gulf Futurism. Per its tagline, SpaceToon is “the channel of the youth of the future.” The channel’s central conceit is an “in-universe” solar system of ten planets, each corresponding to a theme-based programming bloc complete with its own animation and musical number.