into Dubai

»That unfamiliar look and foreignness I still sense despite the very open cultural environment in Dubai is a very important aspect for me – both my own unfamiliar look at this culture and this culture’s unfamiliar look at me that I encounter here. It is much more a culture of looking than listening.«
Markus Hechtle

Today Dubai is a boomtown in the Middle East and a city of superlatives. Nowhere else around the globe are so many spectacular buildings currently being constructed as in this desert city on the Persian Gulf. Originally a small fishing and pearl divers’ settlement Dubai developed into the futuristic metropolis of the orient thanks to the oil boom. At present Dubai is a city of global migration of workers like no other. Over 85 % of its population are migrant workers from industrialized nations but also immigrant workers from poorer countries in Asia often living on the “dark side” of this luxury world. Dubai, the mega-orient of the future, oscillates between its Moslem tradition and western modernity.