Rewriting history and building community: Abu Dhabi in the Emirati art environment

Rewriting history and building community: Abu Dhabi in the Emirati art environment

Starting this year, Abu Dhabi is building a contemporary art scene tending to the local community, positioning itself as the main taste-maker in the discourse on the Global South in the Middle East. In one of the rooms of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, scenes of what resembled a 1600s European tapestry series drew me in. It was of Queen Hecuba from the Iliad carving out a man's eye with a knife. Besides the crudeness of the scene, what caught my eye were…