Dialogue, exchange and experimentation at the Etihad Museum

CLIENT

Dubai Culture and Arts Authority

SERVICES

Programming
Cultural Project Management
Operational Execution
Festivals
Audience

SECTORS

Museums
Heritage
History
Communities

YEAR

2022-2026

brief

The Etihad Museum is mandated to collect, preserve, and display cultural artefacts related to the UAE’s social, cultural, political, scientific, and military history. Increasingly, the Museum’s ambition was to engage with new audiences through more expansive, less permanent-display-driven programming, aligned to the larger perception shift of the Museum becoming a site of dialogue, exchange, and experimentation, in addition to being the primary repository of the Nation’s founding history.

RESPONSE

Merging contemporary narratives with national history

The Etihad Museum Cultural Season was engineered to enable the Museum to consolidate its historical mandate while programming more intentionally to target audiences, namely, in Season 1, Dubai’s growing creative class. Strategically, the Cultural Season was predicated on the Museum’s ambition to contribute to conversations beyond the purely historical frame, engaging with contemporary voices that interrogate current cultural issues, and evoke future trends and research. Every Cultural Season springs from an Emriati heritage bedrock to include broader creative and cultural practitioners. This intention to merge contemporary narratives with legacy is evident in the Season titles:

Season 1 (2022) Contemporary Histories

Season 2 (2023) Living Legacies

Season 3 (2024) Future Echoes

Building communities by creating shared celebrations

The Museum’s inaugural annual festival, entitled ‘Ramadan Nights at the Etihad Museum’ (15-16 March 2024) was devoted to exploring and celebrating the moon. This ‘astro-suhoor’ weekend, set outdoors under a waxing crescent, capitalised on the moon and the night sky as a galvanising cultural wellspring. Providing a highly contemporary take on traditional lunar narratives, collaborators ranged from the scientific to the gastronomic, including photographic interventions and workshops. Museum perception shifted from a somewhat scholarly, indoor exhibition-focused institution, to a welcoming community presence for whom celebration has become not only an institutional differentiator, but an inter-generational magnet.

Related Projects

Building audiences for Etihad Museum

Etihad Museum is a Dubai landmark that educates and inspires visitors with the story of the UAE. Alserkal Advisory crafts its public programme to reinforce the historic museum as a contemporary site of dialogue.

Ephemeral interventions at Etihad Museum

The Advisory developed a series of rotating museum interventions to activate the museum throughout opening hours.

Producing new knowledge with the Etihad Museum

Etihad Museum worked closely with Alserkal Advisory to develop a grant initiative to position the museum as a site of knowledge production.

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