When we imagine "the future," we often default to familiar images: sleek robots, chrome surfaces, and neon-lit cityscapes. But whose future are we seeing? And who gets to shape it? Our spring 2026 exhibition, What's between, between?, challenges the dominant narratives that have long dictated how progress, development, and tomorrow itself are imagined—particularly for those who are told their futures are being built for them, rather than by them.

 

The exhibition takes Gulf Futurism as its starting point—a term that emerged to describe the unique experience of rapid transformation across the Arabian Peninsula, where hyper-modernization and clashing visual cultures create a distinctive sense of living between multiple temporalities. It captures the dizzying collision of histories with futures, luxury malls alongside desert landscapes, and centuries-old traditions coexisting with cutting-edge technology. Yet too often, this complexity is reduced to aesthetic shorthand or corporate vision decks. What's between, between? moves beyond these surface readings by amplifying voices often marginalized in discussions about the Gulf's future—and in doing so, asks what we've been missing when we mistake dominant cultures for the cutting edge.

Featuring loaned works, new commissions, and digital content by more than 20 artists from the Gulf—who occupy various in-between positions—the exhibition refuses a single, unified definition of Gulf Futurism. Instead, it invites you to explore the uncomfortable, unresolved spaces between established concepts, seeking to discover what dissolves, what crystallizes, and what remains as societies transition from traditional structures to capitalist consumer cultures within a generation.

 

Salt provides the exhibition's central metaphor. Throughout history, it has been essential yet destructive, a preservative yet corrosive, ancient yet contemporary. The Gulf, similarly, occupies these juxtaposing positions—straddling past, present, and future. Salt remains constant: from the depths where pearl divers once harvested treasures to the heights where clouds are seeded, from the preservative that enabled traditional survival to the byproduct of modern desalination, from natural resource to technological challenge. Like the Gulf itself, salt exists in a state of perpetual transformation yet retains its essential nature.

 

The Earth's atmospheric layers—a gradient of pressures, temperatures, and compositions that separates and connects—provide the exhibition's structural framework. From the dense troposphere (where mall culture and global trade collide) to the satellite-studded thermosphere (where communication networks and space ambitions converge), each layer represents a distinct pressure point in how futures are negotiated. The exhibition encourages you to make connections and look in-between; examine a region where everything exists simultaneously as multiple things: desert and metropolis, tradition and disruption, local and global. It redirects you from macro-narratives of national visions to micro-optics of peripheral stories—oscillating between rigid yet brittle frameworks.

 

One might question the connection between elements as seemingly disparate as salt crystals, atmospheric layers, and futurism; yet, what binds these is how they address a fundamental question: for whom was the future prescribed? This exhibition offers a critical framework for understanding not only the Gulf's trajectory, but also our collective global future. In this gap—this space between, between—we might discover what was and what will be, as well as what could be when we expand our sense of what futures look like emerging from different starting points.