Description

The story of art, country by country — told the way it's rarely told anywhere else: in full, one nation at a time.

Most people who love art can name a handful of Western movements without thinking twice. Ask the same person about the pioneers of Emirati conceptual art, the women who staged Saudi Arabia's first public exhibition in 1968, or the founder of modern Qatari painting, and the trail usually goes cold. Not because those histories are thin — they're not — but because nobody has sat down and told them properly, episode by episode, country by country.

That's what this podcast does.

Each season is devoted to a single nation's art history, moving from its earliest visual traditions through the generation of pioneers who first broke with convention, the collectives and ateliers they built, the institutions that followed, and the contemporary scene as it stands today. Season One covers the Gulf in full — the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain and Kuwait — tracing figures like Hassan Sharif, the so-called father of conceptual art in the Gulf, whose desert performances and "semi-systems" quietly reshaped what art could be in the region; Safeya Binzagr and Mounirah Mosly, whose joint 1968 exhibition in Jeddah was the first ever held by women in the Kingdom; and Jassim Zaini, remembered as the father of modern Qatari art. Season Two opens the lens wider, moving into Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Iran and North Africa — the modernist capitals of Cairo and Baghdad, the poets-turned-painters of Beirut, and the movements that shaped Arab modernism long before the Gulf's museum boom began.

Hosted by Layla Hourani, a cultural historian with an unhurried, scene-setting style, each episode treats art history as a way into a country's wider story — its politics, its migrations, its relationship with modernity — not as a list of names and dates.

This is a listen for collectors who want context before they buy, for anyone visiting a gallery who'd like to know what they're looking at, and for listeners who simply enjoy a well-told history. New episodes release regularly as the series expands beyond the Gulf into the wider MENA region and, eventually, further afield.

Explore the galleries, artists and institutions connected to every episode at exhibo.art — the global directory built to make markets like these visible to the rest of the world.