Museum Of Islamic Art Doha Biography
Source:- Google.com.pkMuseum of Islamic Art in Doha: 'It’s about creating an audience for art'
Mark Hudson looks at the truly dizzying array of cultural activity currently going in and around Doha, the capital of Qatar.
Museum of Islamic Art in Doha
Museum of Islamic Art in Doha
By Mark Hudson3:55PM GMT 20 Mar 2013Comments25 Comments
When they decided to build the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, the veteran Chinese-American architect IM Pei was summoned out of retirement to design it. The fact that the then 86-year-old Pei was best known for the landmark glass pyramid in the forecourt of the Louvre — still widely regarded as the world’s greatest museum — was by no means accidental. The Museum of Islamic Art was designed to make an impact: to put the Qatari capital on the map as a cultural centre and to broaden global perceptions of Islamic culture. Just five years after its opening, this groundbreaking institution is already acclaimed as one of the world’s great museums.
Qatar is a tiny country (the size of Yorkshire) with vast mineral resources (the world’s third largest reserves of natural gas) and big ideas about how this wealth can be used to create a place in the world. Rising out of the milky turquoise waters of the Persian Gulf, the cubistic pyramid form of the Museum of Islamic Art is just the tip of the iceberg of a truly dizzying array of cultural activity currently going in and around Doha — much of it the last thing you’d expect to find it in a puritanical Islamic absolute monarchy.
A Damien Hirst retrospective, a display of cutting edge choreography from Sadlers Wells wunderkind Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and an art and disabilities festival — the Middle East’s first — are just a handful of the Doha highlights of Qatar UK 2013, a year -long programme of events in both countries, involving Shakespeare’s Globe, the Royal Academy and the Serpentine Gallery, among a whole range of top-drawer British institutions.
While this might smack on paper of the kind of worthy one-off event that will have little long term impact on a society that is in many respects deeply traditional, that isn’t borne out by what’s happening here. The ongoing public art programme of the Qatar Museums Authority, headed by Sheikha Mayassa al-Thani — daughter of the Emir of Qatar, the country’s hereditary ruler, and, according to the Economist, “the art world’s most powerful woman” – includes works by American sculptor Richard Serra (a colossal steel column on the harbour front), YBA Sarah Lucas, and Swiss duo Fischli & Weiss (the same 'Rock on Top of another Rock’ which is currently drawing crowds in Kensington Gardens). In other words, Qatar is now effectively exporting international contemporary art to Britain.
Bowling along Doha’s cornice, you pass on one side clusters of dhows, the sailing vessels that have plied the Gulf and the Indian Ocean for millennia, and on the other a forest of futuristic towers that makes London’s current crop of such structures look positively dowdy. If much of their office space is not yet occupied, this appears a mere detail in the Qatari masterplan. The country’s aim, decreed from the top, is to transform itself from a carbon-based economy into a knowledge-based economy by 2030.
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That is a dauntingly ambitious target, but things can move fast when funds are near-unlimited and decisions can be made in an instant by Emiral decree. And culture is at the forefront of this great endeavour.
I’m on my way now to Katara, a newly created “cultural village” beside the sea, a network of shady lanes with canvas canopies keeping off the blazing Gulf sun, which is home to a whole cluster of institutions including the Doha Film Institute, the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra and the Arab Postal Stamps Museum. Among the exhibitions showing or about to open in the various galleries are 'Made in the UK’, Martin Parr’s grungily idiosyncratic photographs of Middle Britain, portraits of Arab women athletes by French celebrity photographer Brigitte Lacombe and a display of works by Qatari artist Amar al-Aathem.
Beside the complex stands a vast marble amphitheatre open to the sea, used for concerts and performances, around which huge screens are suspended during the annual Doha Tribeca Film Festival — a collaboration with the legendary New York festival. If the scale is Olympian and the range of partnerships mind-boggling — from Tate to the BBC Symphony Orchestra there seems barely a major British cultural institution that isn’t somehow involved in Doha — you can’t help wondering who all this activity is actually for.
“It’s about building an audience for art and developing the artists of the future,” says Mayssa Fattouh, artistic director of the Katara Arts Center, a pleasantly chic gallery and café. “We’re showing Qatari artists alongside international names. Visiting artists are doing workshops with local artists and schoolchildren, building on the traditional culture that’s already here. It’s an organic, ongoing process.”
But the most exciting current public art project is happening in a succession of underpasses on the highway out of the city, where Franco-Tunisian street artist El Seed (El Cid, get it?) is creating a sequence of vast spray-canned panels with the assistance of local students.
The artist’s assistant Khalid Ali explains that his style, known as calligraffiti, combines the raw improvisation of “tagging” with the sweeping arabesques of traditional Islamic calligraphy — while the phrases unfurling along these booming tunnels are taken from ancient poetry expressing pride in the desert and the nomadic way of life. “We had to specially import the spray-cans,” he says, with some amusement. “Graffiti is illegal here.”
There’s an even deeper sense of the ways Qatar’s cultural development can be integrated with existing Middle Eastern forms at Mathaf — the Arab Museum of Modern Art — based around the world’s largest collection of modern and contemporary Arab art, amassed by the Emir’s cousin, Sheikh Hassan Al-Thani. Currently showing on the top floor, with surprisingly little fanfare, are works by five early Middle Eastern modernists, which show how individual artists, generally working in isolation, were fusing traditional forms with Western ideas, often to very beautiful effect, as early as the 1920s.
But any sojourn in Qatar will inevitably and rightly revolve around a visit to the Museum of Islamic Art, whose unmistakable structure evokes a range of traditional Islamic architectural forms, with two lighting vents at the summit anomalously evoking eyes glimpsed above a veil. As you enter, your gaze is carried up towards the geometric apex, while the great looping lighting rigs hanging overhead enhance the sense of the place as a kind of secular mosque. Ahead you can see through immensely tall windows across the bay towards the post-modern skyline of contemporary Doha.
Indeed, what’s most striking as you walk through the galleries of peerless objects, exquisitely displayed, is how much Islamic art has interacted with other cultures, whether it’s China in Central Asia, Byzantine Greece in the eastern Mediterranean, India in the Mughal courts or the Christian West in Spain and North Africa. The processes of synthesis taking place in Qatar today have precedents going back thousands of years.
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Museum Of Islamic Art Doha Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
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Museum Of Islamic Art Doha Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
Museum Of Islamic Art Doha Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
Museum Of Islamic Art Doha Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
Museum Of Islamic Art Doha Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
Museum Of Islamic Art Doha Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
Museum Of Islamic Art Doha Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
Museum Of Islamic Art Doha Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
Museum Of Islamic Art Doha Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
Museum Of Islamic Art Doha Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
Museum Of Islamic Art Doha Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
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