How boundary-pushing creatives are transforming Muscat's arts scene

It rains all night, then it rains all day, and then it rains all night again. The Sultanate of Oman — one of the hottest, driest countries on Earth — has been swallowed by a deluge, with a year’s worth of precipitation falling in four days. Outside my Muscat hotel window, the low, flat roofs of the capital — where skyscrapers are banned to preserve the traditional aesthetic — stretch to the horizon like a patchwork of flooded rice paddies. The sun finally emerges and I head outside, where a group of men are attempting to rescue a Toyota Land Cruiser, parked up to its wing mirrors in a pool of water. “You may not believe this,” says a watching taxi driver, shaking his head wryly, “but in Oman we actually pray for rain.”

I take a taxi along rapidly drying roads to Muttrah Souk, Oman’s most famous market — a labyrinth of shops selling rosewater, curved khanjar daggers (an Omani national emblem), tribal jewellery of the Bedouin people from the country’s inland deserts, and much else besides. The recent deluge has created an ankle-deep river running along the souk’s tiled floor. Stained glass inlaid in the mahogany ceiling sends orbs of colourful light bobbing on the surface of the water; confused-looking cats, perched on steps and doorways, paw at them as they pass.

Outside the front entrance of the souk, I find the harbour, where traditional wooden dhows bob in the shadows of gleaming cruise ships. Behind me is an atmospheric tumble of tall townhouses and winding alleyways. Here, wooden balconies creak in the warm breeze, darkened doorways exhale plumes of frankincense smoke and mysterious figures flit behind mashrabiyas, the latticed wooden windows typical of traditional Middle Eastern architecture.

On the outer wall of the souk is a stencil depicting Sultan Haitham bin Tariq in courtly robes and a bundled turban. Beside him stands his cousin and predecessor, Qaboos bin Said, who died in 2020 after a 50-year reign that transformed Oman from an obscure backwater into a modern nation. This modest, state-sanctioned mural is the closest thing to street art that you’ll find in Muscat — Berlin or New York, it is not. And yet, beneath the tranquil, traditional veneer, a vibrant contemporary art scene is starting to bloom thanks to a new generation of boundary-pushing artists.

One of the most prominent is Budoor Al Riyami, a multimedia artist who exhibited on Oman’s behalf at the Venice Biennale in 2022. I pull up to her address in the Bawshar neighbourhood, a residential huddle of sugarcube-like white houses on the southern fringe of Muscat, where the city gives way to dusty, cinnamon-brown mountains, criss-crossed with hiking trails. Budoor greets me at the door, dressed in a headscarf and blue abaya robe. The walls are covered with artworks that display the breadth of her talent: photographic portraits overlaid with poetic Arabic calligraphy, and abstract artworks made from colourfully painted, foraged sheep bones. Budoor’s work can be found exhibited across Muscat, from the Stal Gallery, a contemporary art space in the upmarket Madinat Sultan Qaboos neighbourhood, to the newly opened St Regis Al Mouj, a five-star hotel close to the airport.

“In Muscat, the urban and natural are connected,” she says, as she shows me a piece made from brightly painted sheep femurs. “You can walk five minutes from the city, find a nice wadi [valley] and hear all the birds and insects.” Muscat is a capital city of nearly two million people, but it feels somnolent and slow, far from a bustling metropolis. Naturally cocooned between the Hajar Mountains on one side and the wine-bottle-green Arabian Sea on the other, the city’s setting in a sheltered bay means it was historically difficult for navigators to spot from the water, leading the ancient Greek geographer Ptolemy to name it Cryptus Portus (‘Hidden Harbour’). That was in the 2nd century CE, by which time Muscat was already a significant trading post on the Maritime Silk Roads. Today, Muscat’s serene, cloistered atmosphere is reflected in the wider geopolitical role that Oman plays in the Persian Gulf: a peacemaker sandwiched between Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Iran.

We drink cardamom coffee and eat biscuits stuffed with dates as Budoor tells me how she negotiates the conventions of Oman’s traditional society without compromising her art. “You have to be clever as an artist,” she says. “I wanted to talk about the female body, but we have this taboo against showing nudity. So I made human-sized naked Barbie dolls and exhibited them instead. People were shocked, but they couldn’t say anything — everyone has Barbie dolls at home.”

She has also used her art to shine a light on forgotten members of society. “I noticed one day there was some mess on the road. People were saying, ‘Are the street cleaners coming today?’ But they were there already; people just couldn’t see them. They are invisible.” She gave them new brooms and exhibited the old ones in an installation, alongside a series of photographs.

Another artist using her work to challenge perceptions is Safiya Al Bahlani, a painter, designer, gallery owner and disability rights activist. I meet her at Safiya Arts, her gallery and studio, which she opened in 2018 in the bustling residential district of Azaiba, a central neighbourhood of modest brick minarets and shwarma cafés leading to the quiet expanse of Azaiba Beach. Safiya shows me some of her works hanging on the walls — brightly painted but blank-faced representations of people in traditional Omani dress. “I prefer not to have faces in my work,” she says. “It’s about representing people through their character, rather than what they look like.”

Safiya has overcome significant barriers in her life. She was born with no hands, a shorter right leg, and speech and learning difficulties. “Because I have memory problems, I would use colours and patterns to remember things, and I found I had a huge passion for art,” she says. “When I started applying for jobs, I realised our society was not ready for people like me. So I threw myself into my art.” She’s currently planning an exhibition that makes art out of the prostheses that she’s worn on her leg over the years; she also works with disabled children, empowering them to express themselves creatively. “I want to show that you shouldn’t judge people who are different; you should look at what they’re capable of doing through their work,” she says.

Heritage & innovation

Two miles east of Safiya’s studio, in the neighbouring Al Badi neighbourhood, is INMA Arts, an art education venue and gathering place for Muscat’s artists that launched in August 2023. It’s a modern, airy space, divided into studios, classrooms and a boutique selling work produced by the resident artists; owner Radhika Hamlai’s vibrant oil paintings also hang on the walls. “When I started working, Omani art was all very traditional and landscapey — very few artists were thinking outside of the box,” says Radhika, an Indian-born Omani woman, as she shows me around. “Now, 90% are thinking outside of the box.”

One of those is Mohammed Alattar, a multimedia artist who is here to teach one of his regular digital art classes. A thoughtful, softly spoken man with glasses and a thick black beard, Mohammed tells me that challenging gender norms is one the primary motivations behind his work, which he releases under the name Mimoon. “Coming from an Arabian world, toxic masculinity is very widespread,” he says. “It’s considered feminine when men are expressing their emotions. I wanted to create a safe space through my art — a man freely expressing whatever thoughts and emotions I’m going through.”

Many of Mohammed’s artworks are self-portraits, showing him broken into pieces and then re-constructed — usually in a characteristically vibrant, cartoonish style. “It will take a long time to reach a stage where everyone can express themselves completely freely,” he says. “But thanks to social media, the new generation of Omani artists is very open to different ideas.”

Tradition and modernity do not collide in Oman; they inform one another. As the sun goes down, I visit the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque, a masterpiece of neo-Islamic architecture opened in 2001 in the Al-Ghubra neighbourhood. Families chat on the grass and a father and son play a makeshift game of cricket, as above them the mosque’s gilded dome glows in the sunset like burning coal. The mosque’s straight, clean lines and minimalist marble façade are strikingly modern, but guided by traditional Islamic principles. Most obviously, there are no depictions of humans or animals, with ornate geometric patterns used in their place — an Islamic tradition going back centuries.

This disinclination towards figurative art lines up neatly with the sensibilities of many of Oman’s young abstract artists, who are instinctively keen to move away from traditional representations of people and animals. I had noticed the lack of faces in Safiya’s work, and find the same in the art of Humaid Al Aufi — a painter who I meet at Shades of White, an exhibition by the Matti Sirvio Gallery in Muscat’s DoubleTree by Hilton hotel. At 27 years old, and with an exhibition in Venice on the horizon in 2025, Humaid embodies the new generation of outward-facing Omani artists. He’s dressed traditionally, in a snow-white dishdasha robe and embroidered kuma (Omani cap), but his work is eye-catchingly contemporary, with blocks of bright colour offset by chasms of white negative space.

“I like to make people confused,” he says with a smile. “Here in Oman, people traditionally like realistic art. They used to ask me why I wasn’t painting forts.” Oman’s hundreds of fortresses, which loom above the desert like giant sandcastles, are a mainstay of traditional Omani landscape art, as well as a fixture on many travel itineraries. “But now they’re finally starting to change their minds.”

I return to Muttrah to find that as the heat of the day has receded, Muscat has sprung into life. Friends are walking and chatting along the photogenic corniche, and market traders are setting up shop in the souk again, after the flood. It’s said that this souk is one of the only places in the world where you can still buy gold, frankincense and myrrh under one roof. I duck back inside, thinking these treasures might make appropriate souvenirs — the weather’s certainly been biblical. I suggest as much to a stallholder, who is laying out fragrant blocks of bukhoor (agarwood) on shelves. He responds with a smile and an easy shrug. “It was very bad. But now it has passed, alhamdulillah.”

Over his shoulder, there are artworks lined up for sale: still, for the most part, touristic scenes depicting desert forts, oases and silver Omani coffee pots. But beneath the surface, if you know where to look, Muscat’s young artists are giving visitors a taste of the avant-garde — a rare thing indeed in the Gulf, and, perhaps, a glimpse into the region’s future.