Focus on Qatar: the first step is to discover the “Here and There” scheme

Out of our list of the nine main art institutions due to open in the next five years, two of them are actually located in the Arabian Peninsula, whose importance is thus expected to increase on the international cultural scene. Therefore, since Qatar stands out to be the main leader in shaping the cultural identity of this strategical area, with the Qatar Museum Authority investing in culture $1.3 billion in 2015 and the Al-Thani family still significantly active in the art market – as the $300M oil painting by Paul Gauguin recently purchased by “a group of public museums in Qatar” proves (Nafea Faa Ipoipo, 1892) – we decided to spend some days in Doha to look closely at this extraordinary cultural flowering.

 

But instead of focusing on the big issue of the Qatar National Museum, whose opening date is still to be officially confirmed, we prefer to begin our journey from “Here and There”, the show currently at the Qatar Museums Gallery Alriwaq, that is the main contemporary art space in Doha at the moment. This comprehensive group exhibition, which puts in dialogue two different contemporary art realities such as Brazil and Qatar, seems to perfectly explain what Professor Sultan Barakat, recently appointed director of research at the influential Brookings Doha Center, calls the Qatar’s policymakers “holistic” approach. “Every single project is finalized and integrated in a larger plan” he said to us when we met in the under-restoration Souq of Waqif. And according to the notorious Ted speech given by H.E. Sheikha Al Mayassa in 2010, part of this plan is indeed to bring Qatar’s culture and the idea of Islamic culture, to the attention of the international scene.

 

If one bears it in mind, it will be easy to understand the reason why main works by renown Brazilian artists such as Caetano Veloso, Ernesto Neto, Fernanda Gomes, Adriano Costa or Sara Ramo, are asymmetrically exhibited along with artworks by sometimes still fragile emerging artists from Qatar. Effectively this show proves to be a reliable occasion to figure out where Qatari contemporary artists are at the moment and where they could be in a few years if they keep on walking in the right direction as well as following the long term strategy that investments in culture especially require to be really profitable.

 

All of the 42s artist included in the show, therefore, contribute to create the positive feeling that art and artists can really reduce the distance between what is “here”, and what is “there” in the beholder’s mind. And this feeling ends up to be stronger than the struggles that some of the artworks actually do reflect. The no identity workers installed by 1969 born Qatari artist Khalifa Al-Obaidly in the last room of the show, for example, or the melancholic human organs photographed by Sofia Borges (b. 1982) tend to lose their tragic connotation in such a positive setting, eventually representing not the high price that the two countries are paying for their development, but the forgive and forget pattern you should adopt if you want to continue the dream. At the same time, works exhibited in the section dedicated to artists’ books – “Stress” by Milton Marqued and “The Ocean series” by Fabio Morais deserve to be mentioned – the evidence of how some problems are indeed the same, here and there. These problems mainly deal with identity, cultural tradition, technology, and languages. These elements draw the line wherein artists are inquiring, and it doesn’t really matter if watching the interviews about the exhibition on its web-site may lead you to think that they seem just actors in the service of the “perfect” system of communication enacted by the show: take an holistic point of view and remember that in the end “all Islamic patterns are based on the idea that what we see is always and only part of a whole that extends to infinity.”

March 9, 2015