Art · Era early 1900s

The Majlis Gallery

In a wind-tower house beside Al Fahidi Roundabout, British artist Alison Collins founded The Majlis Gallery in 1989 — Dubai's first fine-art gallery, a courtyard of paintings, ceramics and glass gathered around a flowering henna tree. For three decades it introduced the city to artists inspired by the region's desert, creek and light, and its small rooms helped shape Dubai's early love affair with art. Its story is woven into the district's own revival, and its name still opens conversations here.

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The House Where Dubai Learned to Look at Art

Every art scene has a front door, and for Dubai it was this one: a modest wind-tower house near the district's entrance, where the story of the city's galleries begins.

British designer Alison Collins moved into the house in the late 1970s, raising her family in its rooms when Bastakiya was still a lived-in, crumbling old merchants' quarter. In 1979 a travelling painter named Julian Barrow knocked on the door; she offered him bed and board, and his pictures went up on her walls. For a decade the house hosted informal exhibitions and evening gatherings, until Collins opened it formally in November 1989 as The Majlis Gallery — the first fine-art gallery in Dubai.

The name was exact: majlis means a sitting place, a room for gathering, and that is precisely what the whitewashed rooms around the little courtyard were. Painters, potters and sculptors from around the world showed here, and some thirty artists stayed as residents over the years. The gallery outlived the demolition threats of the 1980s and traded for more than three decades before finally closing its doors in 2020.

Today the house remains a landmark of that first chapter. Stand at its threshold and you are standing where Dubai's entire art scene — the fairs, the creative districts, the museums — took its first quiet steps.

The House Where Dubai Learned to Look at Art

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