When the American-Qatari artist Sophia Al-Maria and Kuwaiti composer Fatima Al Qadiri coined the term “Gulf Futurism” more than a decade ago, they employed it in two intertwined but dissonant senses. Gulf Futurism in the first sense is descriptive and historical. It names the unfathomably rapid, almost traumatic, oil-driven modernization of the Persian Gulf region, where in the span of a single generation a place like Dubai morphed from a humble fishing port into a high-rise megacity and global financial hub. Bedouins became bureaucrats, camels cars, tents towers.As Al Maria put it, “one of the most ancient ways of living came head-on against extreme wealth and capitalism – glass and steel against wool and camels.” On this understanding, Gulf Futurism is the Burj Khalifa, the Palm Jumeria, the Mall of the Emirates, the Mars probe Hope, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, and the wildly ambitious Vision 2030 plans announced by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. 

Gulf Futurism in the second sense is aesthetic and critical. It names an artistic tendency that reckons with the existential fallout of the aforementioned “Dubai-ification” of the region, marked by the spiraling proliferation of megamalls, megacities, mega-everything. To the extent that Gulf Futurism is a coherent art movement rather than merely the idiosyncratic vision of two individual artists, it is associated with the GCC—an art collective founded in 2013 that deliberately confuses its name with that of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The latter is a political and economic consortium of six Gulf states founded in 1981, comprising Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman. 

The GCC collective parodies the GCC consortium; it is a “delegation” of nine Gulf artists, the exact identities of which have varied over the years. Al-Maria and Al Qadiri were among its founding members. Unlike its intergovernmental counterpart, the art collective’s name is “an image, like a .jpeg file,” not an acronym. Adopting a homonym with as long as a shadow as “GCC” is bold, not least for how it tanks SEO fitness, but it is a decision which encapsulates the collective’s critical project. After all, the aesthetic of Gulf futurism innovated by the GCC is, in the final analysis, a parodic one, parasitic on and subversive of the self-presentation of the Gulf Cooperation Council. 

Gulf Non-Futurism

In the words of one critic, “when GCC…appropriate the gestures and self-mythologizing imagery involved in diplomatic proceedings, they seek to uncover them 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, at once local and impersonal, 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.” Put differently, Gulf Futurism, as interpreted by the GCC, is a representation of Gulf hyperreality, a simulacrum of a simulacrum. 

Across exhibits in New York, London, Kuwait, Berlin, Beijing, Copenhagen, and Dubai, the GCC 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 an ironic and even cynical one—much closer to an aesthetics of capitalist realism than anything resembling the blistering optimism of Italian Futurism, or most other futurisms since. Gulf Futurism, as understood by the GCC art collective, describes a future that is already present as environmental disaster and consumerist dystopia.

Al-Maria’s 2016 solo exhibition in the United States, Black Friday, articulates Gulf Futurism in its most obviously pessimistic, capitalist realist register. As Christopher Lew writes, the video-based exhibition is “ouroboros-like,” 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,” even as the video’s narrator speaks of a dream that is a nightmare, and an “apocalypse that is already here.” As a term and a concept, then, Gulf Futurism is conflationary and oxymoronic. It does not distinguish between the state-managed, oil-fueled project of social, economic, cultural, and technological modernization, and the aesthetic critique of said modernization as inauthentic unreality. Gulf Futurism is in fact Gulf non-Futurism. The corporate state conceals what itscorporate critics reveal: behind the gloss and pomp, the big nothing.

But even the GCC understands, on some level, that Gulf non-Futurism maintains a relationship, however tenuous, with the future. For all that its artists dismiss as fake the patriotic pan-regionalism and technological utopianism peddled by the Gulf Cooperation Council, they still registered shock at the deployment of Peninsula Shield (the GCC’s military) to suppress the 2011 protests in Bahrain: “Everyone knows that it’s a show union, not a real union…Then it became so real.” It was a moment which suggested the real-world power of belief: “By producing these regionalist pop songs and media productions and things like that, [the GCC has become] reality for a lot of people.” With this begrudging admission, the GCC collective comes close to understanding that the bugs they have sought to expose with their artworks—the artifice of all the very official summits, forums and press conferences—are in fact integral to the design. There’s an extent to which these artists are stuck in a Platonic frame, fixated on a distinction between the Real and its shadows which matters less than they believe.

The GCC’s 2017 Basel exhibition, “Belief in the Power of Believe,” is truer than its own creators may have known. Its meditation on the Gulf governments’ co-option of “positive energy movements” as state policy, while clearly satirical and critical, may be better read as simply documentary. “Belief in the power of believe”— this is indeed state policy. It is not merely a cynical tool of legitimation and depoliticization. It is, in all seriousness and sincerity, the official strategy by which the Gulf states intend to bring forward the future. 

I want to demonstrate what I mean by examining two projects that I take to be especially representative of Gulf Futurism, understood here as a top-down, state-sponsored aesthetic and political project that at once represents and realizes the future: the UAE’s Museum of Future, opened in Dubai in 2022; and Saudi Arabia’s state-sponsored animanga production studio, operative since 2017. The question I ask is, what is Gulf Futurism as seen from the perspective of the state, rather than its critics? 

Tomorrow Today

The Museum of the Future is a remarkable feat of engineering. Built at a cost of $136 million, the torus-shaped structure is seven stories tall and clad in more than a thousand stainless steel/fiberglass/carbon-fiber panels, each designed with 3-D modeling software and individually molded by the computer-driven machinery of a local Emirati company. “The project….is an example of how buildings may be designed and assembled for decades to come: a blend of human skill and digital power,” declared the New York Times. Five floors of interactive exhibits invite visitors to imagine Earth in 2071. The tour begins on the top floor, at the OSS Hope space station (named after the Emirati Mars probe), before descending through the HEAL Institute (featuring a digitally re-created Amazon rainforest, a DNA library of 2,400 specimen, and a laboratory touting the ecological possibilities of human-engineered biodiversity), an “oasis” exploring the therapeutic potentials of supersonic devices and evolved meditation techniques, and a children’s play area for “Future........

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