The Barjeel Art Foundation, the organization that facilitates the celebrated trove of modern and Arab art assembled by Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, has broken ground on its first dedicated museum in Sharjah, due to open in January 2028.
Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi announced the news on Instagram yesterday alongside a photograph from a recent visit to the 38,750-square-foot site on Sheik Mohammed Bin Zayed Road earmarked for the museum, noting that Abdelmoneam Essa of Architecture Corner Consultants has been tapped for the project. Essa’s design draws on sketches and photographs by Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi of architecture in the Al Rigga neighborhood, he added.
The Barjeel Art Foundation, the independent collecting institution that manages the artworks, has in recent years broadened its collaborations, lending works farther beyond the Emirates and engaging more deeply with regional institutions, in step with the region’s deliberate bridge-building. With a stated mission to deepen Arab art history while nurturing contemporary artists, it has made its holdings available online and regularly curates, lends, and publishes.
Last March, during Women’s History Month, it launched a virtual gallery of abstract art by women from the SWANA region in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture. Later that year, it loaned roughly 40 works to “Resonant Histories” at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, an exhibition that positioned itself as the first to construct an art-historical dialogue between Indian and Arab modernism.
“We try to collect works that make sense for the collection,” Barjeel curator Rémi Homs told NASO Art Journal on the occasion of its opening. “We look at academic relevance and, of course, building a collection that can serve as a lasting heritage for the region.”
