What’s between, between?
Arts, Culture, and Creativity
2026
Gulf Futurism has spent a decade being defined from the outside—an aesthetic, a mood board, a term applied to the region rather than asked of it. This exhibition did not set out to settle what the term means. It set out to ask better questions about it, from within the Gulf, through the artists who actually live the betweenness the term gestures at.
Client:
Media Majlis Museum
Services:
Concept, Research, Curation, Commissioning, Interpretation, Editorial Direction, Public Programming Strategy
Credits:
Jack Thomas Taylor and Amal Zeyad Ali with fortytwelve (scenography), Studio Flux (visual identity), and Shamma Buhazza (creative direction)
Image credits:
Supplied
The spring 2026 exhibition at the Media Majlis Museum at Northwestern University in Qatar—the museum’s eleventh—took on Gulf Futurism and tried to move the term past aesthetics toward the situated feeling it actually carries: of being between pasts and futures, traditions and speculations, the region as imagined and the region as lived. Curated by Jack Thomas Taylor with Assistant Curator Amal Zeyad Ali, the exhibition brought together twenty-one Gulf-based artists and examined the term from inside the region rather than through the lens usually pointed at it.
The exhibition ran from 26 January to 14 May 2026, opening deliberately into the week of Art Basel Qatar and Web Summit Qatar. The VIP preview in early January drew more than 700 guests, including senior government, institutional and arts-sector figures, and the run brought thousands of visitors through the galleries.
It was accompanied by a publication produced with Silvana Editoriale and guest-edited by Myrna Ayad, which Jack and Amal directed curatorially and coordinated editorially—from concept through contributor cultivation. The book gathers original essays, dialogues and critical reflections on Gulf Futurism from artistic, academic and speculative perspectives, with contributors including Sophia Al-Maria and Melissa Gronlund. It was built to outlive the exhibition: the durable, citable record of the thinking rather than a souvenir of the install.
Alongside the exhibition, the framework for the In Between Summit was developed which will launch in April 2027; conceived as the principal public programming and structured to seed an ongoing research network rather than function as a single event.