Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, the only museum located in Education City, is ready to welcome visitors to the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 come November.
This was said by the museum’s director, Zeina Arida, to reporters recently. She emphasised that in addition to the new four contemporary exhibitions which will be on display until next year, there are also permanent installations that are now being remodelled.
“We have on the first floor of this building the collection display that we will also do a rotation for 15 days. We want to add more background information for the visitors of the World Cup, because we believe it’s very important that they get an understanding of the context in which these artists were working.”
The collection comes from all over the region including Qatar, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, and Palestine. “Each of them was working in a specific context, but also this is a region that had a lot of artists, that had built very strong relationship and exchange among themselves, so it’s interesting to tell these stories through the collection.”
Mathaf houses the largest collection of modern and contemporary Arab art in the region. It represents major trends and sites of production through paintings, sculptures, works on paper, installation and video works, produced since the mid-19th century until today.
The collection contains over 9,000 works of art from the Arab world and other regions that are historically and geographically connected to the Arabian Peninsula, such as Iran, Turkey and India.
Arida also revealed that a large part of their mission is to document and write the history of artistic practices, wherein the Mathaf Encyclopedia comes in.
“Mathaf Encyclopedia is a collaboration of many scholars and art historians to contribute to the writing of history of modern art through the writing of biographies, publishing of essays, access to the collection.”
She said Mathaf is building the encyclopedia not only for the present time but also for the future. The encyclopedia can be accessed online via encyclopedia.mathaf.org.qa.
The museum's director said they are building a new online platform that will compile the collection, essays, biographies, information about the museum, and its exhibition.
The museum director is also keen to make Mathaf a public art space. “A museum really has this potential of gathering a lot of diverse visions and diverse audience. We are a meeting place before anything else, and this is what I mean by public space. We are open for any kind of visitors, and this is what gives a museum a very important role in any cities, especially in cities that are developing and supporting the culture scene and creative hub, the design scene and which is the case of Qatar today.”
