Pia Copper
The new museums of the Gulf have been the talk of the art world for some time now. The oil-rich countries of the Persian Gulf spent the past decade investing in architects, curators and artworks, quietly building monuments for posterity filled with art and artifacts.
Though dubious about achievements built on the region’s overly rampant capitalism, I was recently won over by a visit to Qatar. Qatar’s museums, the first to emerge on what could be considered the world’s most exclusive coastline, have something to say and they say it with energy. Critics have derided the cultural initiatives as “Las Vegases of the desert,” but others have seen in this effervescence a new era for the Arab world. Like the “Arab Spring” revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, the museums too affirm a new Arab spirit and identity.
The Museum of Islamic Art
Not far from the airport (ideal for those stopping over in Qatar), the MIA or Museum of Islamic Art is a stone’s throw from the flower-lined corniche. The structure imagined by the brilliant Chinese architect I.M. Pei, widely known as the man who pierced the pavements of the Louvre with his glass pyramids, is one of the most exciting new buildings in the world.
A honey-colored palace on a sixty-meter-long man-made island is set against an azure sea, with a background of wooden sailing dhows laden with merchandise. A pale, water-lined bridge links it to the mainland. Entering is akin to entering a Cistercian monastery in Southern France, a space of pale halls and perfect geometry. The heart-shaped main staircase ascends to a beehive-like cupola, that allows the sun to pour through a tiny oval window. Below, a ring-shaped chandelier decorated with arabesques allows light to shine freely through the room.
Pei ingeniously marries elements of Arabian architecture with Asian values of simplicity and asceticism. Throughout the structure, Pei employs elements of the arabesque, a style of repetitive geometric pattern designed to bring one closer to Allah. The ceiling is composed of rows of cupolas, small circular holes enclose lights, and the elevators are punctuated with star friezes. Against the forty-meter high bay window, a fountain in the shape of two-layered, eight-sided stars quietly gurgles.
Main atrium at the MIA
The collection itself, the ruling Al Thani family’s, is just as unique. A tiny Koran, rumored to have been conceived as an insert into a ruler’s ring, sits below a famed page by the scribe Omar El Aqta, property of Timur, otherwise known as “the lame,” or Tamerlame (1336-1405). There is also a carpet with a chess board motif commissioned by Timur, who enjoyed the game of king and queens in his garden even more than conquering Central, Western, and South Asia.
In another room, a series of Korans dating back to the 8th century, in a variety of scripts, hail from Mongolia, Boukhara, and North Africa. A diamond and spinel necklace engraved with Islamic calligraphy sparkles in another cabinet. It is rumored to have come from the personal coffers of Shah Jahan (1592-1666), the Mughal emperor so tormented by grief that he built the Taj Mahal. An ornate blue and gold calligraphic scroll details Suleiman the Magnificent’s last will and testament, in which he leaves his granddaughter a villa on the Marmara Sea.
Mathaf (The Arab Museum of Modern Art) is the other facet of Qatar’s museum boom. Temporarily housed in a school converted by French architect Jean-Francois Bodin, it is set in what seems like a wasteland of sand and cranes in the Education City suburb of Doha.
Mathaf Museum
Soon, a kasbah-like building emerges out of the dust and a vast sculpture, sixty-four blocks of white and black granite depicting an Arabian Noah’s arc, overtakes the viewer. Owls, hippos, falcons and palm trees sit astride a long barge. The work by Adam Henein was a commission sculpted in the stone quarry of Aswan. The magnificent piece points to the new power of museums in the Gulf, able to commission works on a large scale and create opportunities for the Arab art scene. Artists such as Adam Henein and Iraqi painter in exile Dia Al Azzawi have benefited from the overwhelming generosity of the Qatari state through artists residencies and stipends, and the Mathaf Museum library stocks the film and catalogue documentation of the artists’ residencies. Like the American industrialists of the 19th century, the Gulf states are pouring the revenues into art.
Arab modern and contemporary art has never before been at the heart of a museum project. The Sheikh’s collection, amassed over twenty years and watched over by the young Wassan Al Khudairi, its chief curator, constitutes an avant-première of the grander vision for art in the Gulf. In other museums, such as the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris or the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Arab art have been part of a wider collection, but not the main focus.
However, the museum’s mandate is not just to display the art but to educate young people (including artists from the region) who have never been exposed to the pan-Arabic art movements that flourished over the past five decades in other metropolises of the Arab world, such as Cairo, Beirut, Baghdad, and Damascus. "Arab art transcends the categories of Western art,” says Mariam Helmy, the Egyptian-born assistant curator of the Mathaf. “There is no pure abstract movement. Abstraction often includes figurative aspects, and the themes are very different: landscape and spirituality are more prominent than portraiture.”
Mathaf Museum
For the visitor, the works in the Mathaf are a glaring contrast to the works in the MIA. Form and representation contrast with the spiritual and the unspoken. In the Mathaf café, young women artists in Swarovski-covered abayas chat over cappuccinos. In the MIA, families and students from the Koranic schools come to soak up history.
The Sajjil exhibition at the Mathaf (sajjil means “to record”) makes obvious the effervescence of Arab art before and after the Second World War. In the artistic salons of Cairo, Ramallah and Baghdad, a whole generation could talk of nothing but painting, art, and music. A flourishing bourgeoisie commissioned family portraits and artists thrived. Like Farid Belkahia, who was disappointed by a stint at the Beaux Arts in Paris, some went home to find new inspiration and start art movements rooted in their own traditions and religious outlook.
Saaed Shakir, Ismael Fattah, Madiha Umar, and Hamed Nada, are but a few of the artists to disappear from the annals of history only to re-emerge at the Mathaf. The animal pelt sculptures of Farid Belkahia, the indigo calligraphy of Rachid Koraïchi, the surrealist nudes of Ramsis Younan, and the Last Supper of Fateh al-Moudarrès are part of what the Western art world has missed – a rich cultural heritage not to be underestimated.
Qatar’s two new museums are a good omen. In two or three years when other such projects in the region open their doors, including Abu Dhabi’s Guggenheim Saadiyat and Louvre, as well as theaters and opera houses, the Gulf may yet emerge as one of the world’s great cultural centers.
Swalif: Qatari Art between Memory and Modernity is open through Oct. 29 at the Mathaf Museum.
