Catchy title, catchier representation; Art in Saudi Arabia by seasoned reporter Rebecca Anne Proctor, with Alia Al-Senussi, offers an opportune overview of the past, present and future of the Kingdom’s contemporary cultural scene and economy; in particular within the ubiquitous Vision 2030, the trillion-dollar mega project led by Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).

Spanning over 14 centuries, 3 continents and a multitude of mediums, pre-modern Islamic art as an overarching term for “art made by and for people who lived or live in lands where the majority were Muslims” (Bloom & Blair, 1997) constitutes one of the most geographically, temporally and material diverse markets in today’s art world.

Ice in drinks is one of those modern cultural dividers that seems unassuming at first glance, but reveals generational, economical and social dynamics upon closer inspection. For a drinking tradition that is traceable to 4000 years ago, it surprisingly leaves very few pictorial representations for one to explore the transmission and trajectory across various cultures. Struck by the curious disconnect between literary sources and visual depictions, I began to examine the mercurial beast that is the (missing) art history of our favourite thirst-quenching habit nowadays (in some countries).

One of the under-researched areas in the spectrum of Islamic art and architecture is woodwork, partly because of the scarcity of surviving pieces, along with a loss of techniques and a lack of earlier documentations. This essay aims to highlight the development of craftsmanship, materiality, ornamentations and functions of woodwork products in Nasrid Spain.

Over the course of the story, bodies had been born, controlled and transformed, putting to the fore male favouritism and the fear of liminality in the Islamic context. In this essay, I would like to respond to these chapters on Ben Jelloun's use of human and architectural bodies in the construction of a narrative where self-control and purification take centre stage.

From the displays of generosity among the akhi brotherhood to the honourable encounters with ruling families, what can we understand from the code of morality in relation to his construction of status? In this essay, I would like to discuss the three layers of identities, namely personal, social and cultural, invoked through Ibn Battuta’s narrative space of nostalgia and disguise from his journey in the land of kindliness.

In all its shifting shapes and forms, dragons are predominantly depicted in mirror image, representing its dual identity of good and evil, light and darkness, and moon and sun, on stone-carved and plaster reliefs above or around entrances and portals of both secular and religious monuments. This paper aims to explore how dragons become a stylistically different but thematically similar icon across cultures in Anatolia Seljuk architecture, on account of the three approaches by Kuehn, Pancaroğlu and Uyar.