American-Qatari artist, writer, and filmmaker Sophia al-Maria coined the term Gulf Futurism together with Kuwaiti artist-musician Fatima al-Qadiri. As they explained in a Dazed Digital magazine interview: Over the last fifty years, the Arabian Gulf has given birth to a very particular brand of futurism. It is a phenomena marked by a deranged optimism about the sustainability of both oil reserves and late capitalism. Similar to early 20th century Euro-Futurism and mid-century American kitch and retro-futurism, Gulf Futurism is evident in a dominant class concerned with master-planning and world-building, while the youth culture preoccupied with fast cars, fast tech and viddying a bit of ultra-violence. (Al-Qadiri and al-Maria, November 2012) Gulf Futurism explains an existing phenomenon both artists have observed in architecture, urban planning, art, aesthetics and popular culture in the post-oil Persian Gulf. It is a premonition of our global future imbued with science fiction views and technological pessimism. In the last two decades, science fictional art productions together with futurist aesthetics have provided new keys to understanding the present, to critically analyze the past, and to open on utopian or dystopian visions of the future. Giving free way to the unthinkable, the unutterable, science fiction constitutes a main avenue in approaching the complex realities of the Arab Geocultural Space. These representations together with the diasporic condition of many artists, have led to a deep reflection on the notion of ‘uruba (Arabness), searching for new narratives of the autochthonous, as ethnic futurist aesthetics did elsewhere: Finno-Ugrian Ethno-futurism appeared in the 1980s; then came Afrofuturism in the 1990s; Sinofuturism, Indofutusism, Desifuturism, Latin@futurism, and, most recently, Gulf Futurism. This presentation will examine the Gulf Futurism movement through art historical perspectives in Sophia al-Maria and Fatima al-Qadiri’s contemporary projects in order to explore insight into their visual apparitions. Then, we will analyze the different definitions and references attributed to Gulf Futurism in order to understand how this phenomenon became a “starkly avant-garde culture of the Middle East” (Al-Qadiri and al-Maria 2012). Altogether, Gulf Futurism should be understood as a tool used to question and criticize past historical narratives and to formulate new ones that allow to open the horizon to more promising times and to go beyond presentism (Hartog 2003) in the post-oil Arabian Gulf.