Abu Dhabi is the Washington DC of the United Arab Emirates: the seat of national government, fount of federal money, powerful, rather ponderous, as attentive to protocol as a royal court and determined to fly the flag of national prestige. This goes a long way towards explaining the Louvre Abu Dhabi, opening later this year as a reflection of French gloire in exchange for oil money in support of France’s national museums.
Culture usually figures large in a nation’s self-image, but the question here is, what kind of culture and for whom: the Emirati citizens, who are the country’s elite but only 19% of the population; or the 35% who are the more or less transient international middle class—Arab, Iranian, Indian and Western? (The millions of workers from the Indian subcontinent and points east are not expected to be cultural consumers or contributors, and, with some exceptions, notably in Sharjah, are ignored.) These are questions that get debated in the Gulf more than sceptical outsiders imagine, but the “high versus low”, “imported versus local” cultural tensions have not been resolved yet.
Feeling the lack of high culture of the Western sort, Hoda Al Khamis Kanoo set up the Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation (ADMAF) music festival in the capital in 2004, at first with family money, now also supported by the state. ADMAF’s list of patrons from the ruling family reminds one of fulsome 18th-century dedications, but the most significant acknowledgment is to Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak Al Nahyan, widow of the founder of the UAE, who is never seen by the public and has encouraged the royal ladies of Abu Dhabi to be more private than ordinary UAE women.
Although she has been granted the coveted title of Her Excellency, Kanoo is not Emirati but from a leading Saudi trading family and married into the very wealthy Kanoos, a business dynasty of Bahraini origin. Her sister was married to the UAE ambassador to France and she was living with them in 1984 when he was assassinated. The recent naming of a road in his memory shows the debt the ruling family still feels to the family.
She dresses in Chanel and is graciously formidable—it is noticeable that her staff leap sharply to their feet as she approaches. Her French interlude may explain the rhetorical manner in which she talks about art—“It is the shared roots of humanity… a statement of identity of values… it is elegant, it is beautiful, it is hope”—but she is effective. Every April since 2004 she has organised the Abu Dhabi Festival, with classical music, jazz concerts and dance. This month the pianist Lang Lang and dancer Carlos Acosta are among the performers. First it was mainly ex-pats who bought tickets but now a goodly number of Emiratis have attuned their ears to Beethoven, Bach and Chopin and come too.
ADMAF’s activities started by being decidedly elitist, but Kanoo has recognised that times are changing. She now sends musicians to the other emirates, including the poorer, uncosmopolitan eastern ones, and as the body politic of the UAE grows more complex and new cells of the civil society develop, ADMAF joins in with them, taking music therapy into hospitals and to children with Down’s syndrome, and art therapy to women who have been abused and trafficked. With the British Council it runs art business traineeships modelled on the Clore Leadership Programme (Sandy Nairne, ex-director of London’s National Portrait Gallery, is mentoring the director of the Sharjah Museums, for example). With NYU Abu Dhabi and her old friend the artist Christo, a prize for Emirati artists was launched in 2013, while ADMAF is celebrating Emirati art with the exhibition Portrait of a Nation during this month’s festival.
The context is evolving. Hoda Kanoo has gone from being a pioneer to being just one player, albeit a major one, in a more and more complex cultural scene. Now the royal ladies are beginning to come out of their grand seclusion and follow suit, with the wife of the Crown Prince, Sheikha Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan, setting up her own foundation for the arts, culture and heritage. Here is competition that can only be good for this small, peaceful enclave in the Middle East.
• Abu Dhabi Festival, 3-30 April