This paper examines how Gulf futurism, as an art and cultural movement, uses various forms of artistic productions and speculative fictions to link the Gulf’s historical moment and contemporary present, with imagined utopian futures. Through the process of creating knowledge and art, Gulf futurists strive to shift narratives of oppression, hyper-modernism, and state-sanctioned “progress” projects into narratives that re-imagine possible future(s) shaped less explicitly by colonial and racist tendencies. This paper examines Qatar and the UAE’s rapidly growing museum culture and the acquisition of foreign art sponsored by rentier revenues, as examples that embody westernized Enlightenment utopian ideals and as liminal space/s stuck between a traditional past and a planned future. Through an analysis of certain Gulf futurists’ work like Kuwaiti-Sengalese artist/musician Fatima and Mona Al-Qadiri, and Qatari-American writer/artist Sophia Al-Maria, this paper contests Gulf state-sanctioned cultural narratives and productions that express Gulf states’ futuristic ambitions. It argues that cultural resources used by Qatar and the UAE to create their global image through art and cultural productions, may have contributed to their global inclusivity, yet simultaneously also contribute to Gulf locals’ non-inclusivity in said productions on a local-scale. It supports this claim by looking at bottom-up examples of art/cultural productions by Gulf futurist artists, and by providing an alternative reading of their works as a mode of retro-futurist nostalgia, not for the Gulf past but rather, for its future. In doing so, Gulf futurism’s articulation within aesthetics and literature distorts and undermines modernity’s narrative of development and progress in the Gulf and makes visible the often-marginalized actors involved within sites of cultural production. Through an analysis of such productions, this paper aims to enlarge the analysis and investigation of the Gulf’s sphere of knowledge, power and being by asking: who is creating cultural productions in the Gulf? What are these productions for and who benefits from it?