A crunchy, contentious concept, referring both to the hyperdevelopment aesthetic of architecture in the region (“the Blade Runner fantasies of oil princes,” as Natalie Olah puts it in a 2014 Vice article) and the critique of the same.

Writing for Dazed in 2012, artists Sophia Al-Maria and Fatima Al Qadiri describe how the “themes and ideas of Gulf Futurism emerge: the isolation of individuals via technology, wealth, and reactionary Islam, the corrosive elements of consumerism on the soul and industry on the earth, the erasure of history from our memories and our surroundings and finally, our dizzying collective arrival in a future no one was ready for.” Al-Maria’s and Al Qadiri’s own works swirl with imagery of shopping malls, satellite TV, and video games—the stuff of teenage life, a world seen through a screen, always mediated.