The Majlis Gallery

Alison Collins

Partner

Alison Collins arrived in Dubai in March 1976 in a rainstorm, with no one waiting for her at the airport. She was coming to work as an interior designer. She stayed for the rest of her life. Two years after arriving she moved her family into a wind-tower villa in what was then called Bastakiya — a quiet neighbourhood of coral-stone houses near the Creek, home to perhaps 2,000 expatriates in the entire city. In 1979, a travelling English painter named Julian Barrow knocked on her door. She moved the furniture into the garden, sent handwritten invitations and held an exhibition that sold out. That was the beginning. For the next decade she hosted informal soirees in the family majlis while raising three children under the henna tree in the courtyard. When the neighbourhood faced redevelopment in 1988 and the family received an eviction notice, her young son climbed into her lap and told her: "Mummy, you must not let that old house die." They returned within a year. In 1989, Collins formally established The Majlis Gallery as a commercial venture alongside her partner Cheeni Shah — the first fine art gallery in the UAE. Over the next thirty years the gallery introduced some of the region's most significant artists to the international stage, established an Artists in Residence programme that hosted thirty artists, and became what Collins had always intended it to be: a meeting place. Not a white cube. Not a commercial operation in the conventional sense. A living room with paintings on the walls and the door always open. "We just opened the doors and had a soiree," she recalled. "People came because it was a very sociable thing." She closed the gallery in October 2020, on her own terms, with no regrets. She died in Sicily in December 2021, aged 79.