H E Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani
Since its founding, Qatar Museums’ (QM) policy has been intimately tied to human growth on all fronts, including local, regional (the Middle East), and overall preservation of Qatari, Islamic, and Arab cultures.
This was according to Qatar Museums Chairperson, H E Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani speaking yesterday at the Art for Tomorrow panel discussion on Heritage for Tomorrow, which is being held in Florence, Italy. She was joined by other panelists including Irina Bokova, former Director General, UNESCO, and Chair, Democracy and Culture Foundation; and Andreas Görgen, Secretary General, Federal Ministry for Culture and the Media, Germany.
“From the very beginning, our strategy when it came to culture, our museums as a whole were to do with human development – locally, regionally preserving our culture, Islamic culture, Arab culture, Qatari identity,” Sheikha Mayassa said.
This is not the first time she echoed the same sentiment, last year during the same event conducted in Athens in Greece, she mentioned: “I think that’s definitely been a strategy of ours and we’ll continue to do so to empower people to express themselves and have a voice for themselves to tell their own stories to the rest of the world.”
Sheikha Mayassa also emphasised that the country is developing its heritage sites. “Qatar has over 9,000 archeological sites of which we have been working with international missions to help excavate and find things.”
On preservation of heritage sites, she mentioned the Old Palace which was built in the early 20th century by Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thani which she referred to as the “jewel” of the National Museum of Qatar. “We preserved it as it is, we didn’t want to put objects and use it as another gallery, we want people to celebrate the architecture and also realize the size and scale because how people lived in the past is quite interesting for us to study and understand and the notion of people living with their families which still exist today.”
“We’re very much a family community and we want to preserve that as part of our lifestyle as we are building modern institutions and being part of the globalised world.”
The Chairperson noted that QM is concerned about the intangible heritage which according to UNESCO, is made up of activities, expressions, knowledge, and abilities that communities, groups, and occasionally even individuals recognise as being a part of their cultural heritage.
“In National Museum, many criticised us for the delay of the opening that took us over a decade to build the concept, but we focused a lot on oral history with multiple workshops, and different themes and different ideas incorporating that within our museography, as well as commissioning international filmmakers working with the Doha Film Institute.” In response to the rising temperature and climate change and how museums are coping up with this factor, Sheikha Mayassa mentioned that all museums in the country are LEED certified, which is a widely recognised mark of environmental success and leadership. Annual exhibitions on environmental subjects are also staged; the most recent of them is Olafur Eliasson’s project “The Curious Desert” in Qatar’s north; and beach clean-ups are being done as a way to educate families, and children.
And on sustainability, she pinpointed that QM is becoming more strategic in its decisions, for instance, the future Art Mill Museum will be built in a flour mill which is currently operational.
“We also have to influence behaviour change, it’s not just about showing beautiful things and telling people about your concerns, or my concerns, it’s about thinking about how our habits need to change in knowing these facts, making it, breaking it down to the basic information that everyone needs to do to participate.” The cultural leader of Qatar, Sheikha Mayassa, stressed that her organisation’s sustainability policy includes supporting the conversion of old structures into repurposed ones.
“It is strategic and communicating to the rest of the world that you can recycle old buildings and turn them into functioning beautiful places, we’ve done that with the Fire Station, our old Civil Defense building has tuned into Artist in Residence… All of these come into our strategy of sustainability, instead of going in the middle of the desert and build a whole building, we’re becoming more strategic in our decisions.”
