Saadiyat Island

It is 2020, and you have just arrived in Abu Dhabi. It has been 12 years since you were last here – briefly, for work – and so far, at least, there is hardly anything you recognise. The new state-of-the-art airport is a futuristic shopping paradise, passport control is brief and mechanised, and a Japanese-style bullet train will take you straight to your holiday destination of choice: Saadiyat Island.

An idea long in the making, the plan to develop this island around a globally-orientated Cultural District started tentatively in the lifetime of Sheikh Zayed as the flagship project of the Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority (ADTA), whose projects he regarded as crucial to the future of the country and its desire to diversify an oil-based economy. The Cultural District has been shaped since by the guidance of Sheikh Zayed’s two sons, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed, President of the UAE and Ruler of Abu Dhabi and Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi.

The mandate for Saadiyat Island and its cultural district is two-fold, and not without the possibility for misunderstanding. On the one hand leaders speak of the cultural project emanating from Emirati, Arab and Islamic heritage, and on the other, of creating “a world-class destination” that will presumably attract high-class tourists by the planeload, and in so doing develop ties with “the highest calibre of global partners”.

Abu Dhabi hopes Saadiyat will facilitate “greater understanding between all nations,” by building a cultural bridge to foster interaction between the great civilisations of Orient and Occident.

The presence, side by side, of museums like the Louvre and the Guggenheim is sure to attract tourists from the West and beyond, but the true potential of the project is its capacity for engaging local and Arab talent, whose participation will be required if it is to realise its cultural objectives of interaction and exchange.

But it is less these mandates than its unprecedented scale that makes the Saadiyat project so momentous. To call it ambitious would be to understate not only its sheer size but also the vision that lay behind it: a glorious meeting of cultures at the heart of a peaceful Middle East which, while giving up not an ounce of its cultural identity, is moving to the forefront of world economic, technological and cultural accomplishment.

These objectives, and the scale and cost involved, were bound to incite debate. The celebratory announcements of institutional and architectural participation have overshadowed what little detailed information exists about the programming and curatorial plans for the interiors of these grand museums – and this has only widened the scope of a controversy that largely misses the point.

While Saadiyat represents a hugely ambitious bid by the UAE for regional leadership in the cultural field, it is almost more important as a possible new blueprint for the very concept of a cultural venue: rather than a single building, or a complex of the same in an urban environment, a “venue” will now be constituted as a cluster of ecologically sensitive buildings that are themselves artworks — enclosed within a dedicated, naturally circumscribed space.

By the time of its completion in a decade, the Cultural District will represent perhaps the largest concentration of cultural venues anywhere in the world: four enormous museums, a five-stage performing arts centre, and a Biennial Park of 19 multipurpose venues arrayed along a man-made canal.

It may be the only development on the planet whose principal architects – Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Tadao Ando, Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid – are all winners of the Pritzker Prize, the Nobel of architecture.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, designed by Nouvel and Gehry respectively, promise to bring to the region masterpieces from Europe and America. Bruno Maquart, who heads the France Museums Agency, a new organisation intended to implement the agreement between France and Abu Dhabi, and to facilitate co-operation not only with the Louvre but with 12 public institutions who are partners in the plan, talks of the presence of “great French collections spanning prominent fine arts, decorative arts and archaeological findings from all around the world”. The Louvre Abu Dhabi will not only display works on loan from its namesake in Paris, but from other major French museums.

While the presence of these two major names from the West has provoked various criticisms (especially in France), it has also made for local as well as international excitement. Mr Maquart dismisses criticisms to which the Louvre has been subjected from French intellectuals, saying, “I expect everyone to be proud of the ambitious work we will achieve in Abu Dhabi.” For the Emirati artist Abdurrahim ash Sharif, who founded the Flying House Gallery last year in Dubai, such “myopic” reservations about Saadiyat overlook the fact that neither in the Arab world nor elsewhere in the East are there “institutions of such calibre”. “We can only be proud,” he says, of the presence of such centres on UAE soil.

But the Tourism Development Investment Company, which is steering the project, emphasises that it is not simply a matter of replicating institutions: the Guggenheim and Louvre will be “very different” from their namesakes: “We are not importing what already exists. Both will be new concepts for the 21st century and will be adapted to suit the needs of the new generation and the region.” With “a wide geographic outreach”, they will bridge “not only East and West” but also “East and East”.

The parent museums will also be hiring local staff; “It is part of our job,” says Mr Maquart, “to help building and training the future museum’s team.”

Sharif’s positive response typifies the sense of elation that has pervaded Emirati cultural circles, particularly in Dubai. Khaled Alnajjar of dxb.lab, the only Emirati architect with a Saadiyat commission (he will design a pavilion in the Biennial Park), enthuses, “It will be amazing. Can you imagine? It’s a colossal project and the vision behind it is amazing. The experience of going there will be like nothing else. I don’t know about you but I know I will be going there.”

While the Guggenheim Foundation in New York, and the France Museums Agency in Paris, will obviously play a role in directing content in their respective outposts in Abu Dhabi, TDIC say it is “far too premature to commit to specifics” with regard to the other venues – the Sheikh Zayed National Museum, the Maritime Museum, and the Performing Arts Centre, the last of which will not open until 2018.

Lord Cultural Resources, a Toronto-based infrastructure development firm, has been working on designing some of the programs for the Sheikh Zayed and Maritime Museums as well as organising the space within the Louvre. (The firm also managed content for the Saudi Arabian National Museum in Riyadh.) Barry Lord, who heads the firm, says, “Abu Dhabi and Saadiyat are really on the cutting edge of a change that is happening in the art world and the museum world,” Mr Lord said, pointing to a movement out of conventional centres in Europe and America and across to other parts of the world, notably Asia. “Really what’s emerging is a multicultural art world remarkably different from the art world we know, and so you have major museums reaching out I think it’s a really courageous thing for a small country like the UAE to take the lead. It’s heroic.”

Heroism notwithstanding, Abu Dhabi is certainly making a phenomenal investment in art and culture as gateways to an increasingly transnational future where, irrespective of their place of origin, the cultural achievements of humanity, as Mr Sharif describes them, are the property of humanity at large.

Emirati artists like Ibtisam Abdulaziz point, rather more pragmatically, to an increasing “tendency in the Emirates to be aware of the importance of art”. She believes “there is bound to be a positive impact” for local and Arab artists – something Maquart, however tentatively, confirms: “The Agency will help with the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s permanent collection and part of the acquisition process is to commission living artists from all over the world, including naturally the Arab world.” The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will also have funding to establish its own permanent collection, and these works are likely to eventually circulate to the other Guggenheim museums around the world, underscoring the idea that Saadiyat Island will produce a cultural traffic that flows in two directions.

Still, for Ms Abdulaziz, Mr Sharif and many others, the test will be in how the venues actually function: content, programmes and access.

And while details have yet to be determined for the most part, it is clear that both education and Emiratisation are written into the plans. It is clear even at this point that the organisers of the Cultural District are determined to gear programmes and educational outreach toward local residents, and to employ Emiratis from the outset.

Though Abu Dhabi invested enormous capital in bringing Western institutions and their collections to Saadiyat, the museums will be setting up their own administrative offices on the island, investing the enterprise with centuries-old expertise and enabling a “world-class” cultural mentality to take root in Abu Dhabi.

Through the museums and universities that will join them – including New York University and the Sorbonne – the Cultural District aims to provide Emiratis and Arabs with little opportunity to visit the West with exposure to the best that the West has to offer, alongside collections of European-held Islamic art, all of this contributing to the bridge between “East and East.”

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