Field Trip: Doha
By HG Masters
In mid-March, ArtAsiaPacific held a week-long series of writing workshops, open to the public, in Doha, Qatar, at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art. While there, I toured the city’s nascent but rapidly expanding infrastructure of museums, which is overseen by the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA), as well as a few of the independent spaces and galleries that are eking out an existence in a country that has adopted a top-down, government-led approach to culture.
While it’s no longer a secret that the Qatari royal family has been one of the biggest buyers of contemporary art in the last decade, the country still faces a shortage of one important resource: an audience for art. While the IM Pei-designed Museum of Islamic Art, which opened in December 2008, is a major tourist draw, other cultural sites, including Mathaf, are slowly attracting more Qataris and Doha expatriates, as well as students from the city’s universities, to their exhibitions.
