The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will build a permanent collection, organize exhibitions, generate scholarship and undertake educational programs that will examine the history of art produced around the world since circa 1965 from a variety of perspectives. The permanent collection display and temporary exhibitions will both recognize unique contributions to art history and underscore the interconnected dynamics and fundamentally transnational nature of contemporary art practice. Major art-historical movements will be surveyed through the lens of a transnational understanding of world cultures. A dynamic program of changing exhibitions will explore common themes, formal affinities, and other key relationships among the work of artists across time and geography.

The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will invite artists to produce site-specific commissions for dedicated galleries, select exterior locations, and the iconic cones that will circle the museum. In addition, the museum will be a catalyst for scholarship in a variety of fields, chief among them the history of art in the Middle East in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is being developed in collaboration with The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation which, since its founding in 1937, has promoted the understanding and appreciation of art, primarily of the modern and contemporary periods.