Louvre Abu Dhabi Sets Sail Across the Indian Ocean in 'Spices and Wonders'

Louvre Abu Dhabi has just opened its big autumn exhibition, and it is one that puts the MENA region right at the heart of a global story. Spices and Wonders: Sailing the Indian Ocean, on view until 14 February 2027, traces the vast maritime routes that linked ancient societies in Africa, the Middle East and Europe with South and Southeast Asia, from Antiquity to the 17th century.

The exhibition is organised in partnership with the Guimet, National Museum of Asian Arts in Paris, and gathers the goods that once filled the holds of ships crossing the ocean: spices, textiles, ceramics and other cargo that moved between ports, along with the ideas, techniques and beliefs that travelled with them.

It has been put together by a joint team: Dr Guilhem André, Louvre Abu Dhabi's Director of Scientific, Curatorial and Collections Management, and Dr Claire Déléry, curator of the Chinese ceramics collection at the Guimet, supported by Dr Andrea Rozsavolgyi and Fakhera Alkindi of Louvre Abu Dhabi and Dr Lucie Chopard of France Muséums. "Each exhibition offers a fresh angle on the connections and universal languages that define our world," André told The National when the season was announced.

To us, the partnership makes a lot of sense. The Guimet was founded by the French industrialist and collector Émile Guimet, first in Lyon and then in Paris, where it was inaugurated on the Place d'Iéna in 1889, and it describes its holdings as the most complete collection of Asian arts in the world. Louvre Abu Dhabi, meanwhile, was born out of an intergovernmental agreement signed between France and the UAE on 6 March 2007 and was inaugurated on Saadiyat Island in 2017, in Pritzker Prize winner Jean Nouvel's famous domed building, and has built its identity around exactly this kind of cross-cultural storytelling. What's more, the exchange works both ways: according to The National, the exhibition will travel to the Guimet in Paris from 12 May to 6 September 2027.

Spices and Wonders anchors a busy season on Saadiyat. A Board Game Adventure, which looks at games such as chess, carrom, ludo and mancala through history, is already on view, and the sixth edition of Art Here and the Richard Mille Art Prize, themed Confluences and curated by Kamini Sawhney, founding director of the Museum of Art and Photography in Bengaluru, opens on 11 November with contemporary artists from the GCC and India. Living Legacies. Protecting Heritage. Building Hope, organised with ALIPH, follows in late November.

So, why does this matter for the region? For too long, we'd argue, the history of global trade has been told from Europe outwards. An exhibition that treats the Indian Ocean as a meeting point of cultures, and that is conceived in Abu Dhabi before it travels to Paris, flips that perspective in a quietly powerful way. With Frieze Abu Dhabi arriving from 19 to 22 November and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi due to open on 11 December 2026, the capital has rarely offered visitors so many reasons to linger.

We can't wait to see it, and this is certainly a must-see for anyone lucky enough to be in the UAE this autumn.

Spices and Wonders: Sailing the Indian Ocean is on view at Louvre Abu Dhabi from 14 October 2026 to 14 February 2027.

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