Mona Hatoum

Mona Hatoum, Turbulence (detail), 2012, clear glass marbles, 4 x 400 x 400 cm Photo Stefan Rohner. Courtesy Kunstmuseum St. Gallen

The Qatar Museums Authority (QMA) has announced its Spring 2014 program of exhibitions across the cultural sites of Qatar. It starts with the opening of Mona Hatoum: Turbulence at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in February, followed by a solo Etel Adnan show at the same museum in March. The Museum of Islamic Art will host Kings and Pawns: Board Games from India to Spain and sculptures by Richard Serra, some of them of an interactive nature, will be located at the QMA Gallery and the Alriwaq.

As the QMA informs us, this follows the Fall exhibitions that with over 60,000 visitors attending Damien Hirst’s Relics at Al Riwaq, Hajj: A Journey Through Art at the Museum of Islamic Art, Francesco Vezzoli’s Museum of Crying Women at QMA Gallery and Adel Abdessemed’s exhibition L’âge d’or at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art.
The Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art will be showing Mona Hatoum: Turbulence (7th Feb – 18th May 2014), the artist’s largest solo exhibition to date in the Arab world. Curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, the show brings to the forefront the diversity of Mona Hatoum’s work over the last 30 years. The exhibition’s premise builds on the artist’s topical work Turbulence (2012), a 4 x 4 meter square composed of thousands of glass marbles laid directly onto the floor. It consists of more than 70 works ranging from large-scale room installations such as Light Sentence (1992) and Suspended (2011) to smaller works on paper and sculptural objects such as Projection (2006), and Untitled (wheelchair II) (1999) respectively. It also includes some of the artist’s kinetic installations such as + and – (1994 – 2004) and Home (1999). The exhibition is punctuated with a number of the artist’s photographs like Van Gogh’s Back (1995) and Static Portraits (Momo, Devrim, Karl) (2000), as well as documentations of early performances such as Don’t Smile, You’re on Camera (1980) and The Negotiating Table (1983), highlighting the diversity of artistic undertakings that span the artist’s prolific three-decade oeuvre.

Mathaf’s second spring show Art is one of the roads to Paradise by Lebanese-American artist Etel Adnan is on from 16th March till 6th July 2014. Similar to nature consisting of many dimensions, the artistic and literary oeuvre of Etel Adnan contains many different aspects. Through the exploration of this artist’s multidimensionality, the exhibition will highlight the diversity in her work. Providing an extensive overview, the display at Mathaf will include Adnan’s paintings, drawings, leporellos, tapestries, writings and films from the 1960s onwards, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist.

The Museum of Islamic Art’s exhibition Kings and Pawns: Board Games from India to Spain features game boards, game pieces, Persian and Arabic chess manuals, paintings and illustrated manuscripts. This exhibition uncovers the history of board games in the Islamic world, from India to Spain between the 7th and the 20th century. The show focuses heavily on chess, from its origins in India to its adoption by the Persian elite and its subsequent spread across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe following the rise of Islam.

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Partial chess set made of alabaster, Lapis lazuli and coral, probably Egypt, 10th-11th century from the MIA collection.

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Following the 2011 installation of the artist’s first public artwork in the Middle East, 7, a vertical steel sculpture in the MIA Park, QMA has invited American sculptor Richard Serra to exhibit in two cultural spaces in Doha.
At Alriwaq, visitors will be able to experience Passage of Time conceived specifically for the space. The work consists of two immense steel curves, snaking diagonally through the large volume of the exhibition space.  The curves measure 70m in length. As with most of his large-scale sculptures, the spectator needs to take them in from multiple viewpoints. . The work demands to be walked around and through, observed from the exterior as well as the interior. Simultaneously at the QMA Gallery in Katara Cultural Village, a selection of seven sculptures and of four large drawings presents the main stages in the development of Serra’s work, from the first Props in lead and steel to one of the more recent Torqued Ellipses.

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Richard Serra Sculpture
The previous installed sculpture by the American Richard Serra looks out over Doha’s harbor. The Museum of Islamic Art can be seen on the left. Photo: Alain Ducasse.

Location: Posted on: Monday, March 3rd, 2014
 

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