Art, Architecture and the Making of Cultural Identity in Qatar
Blurb: What can a tree reveal about the human body? What do centuries-old Chinese ceramics tell us
about our shared pasts? And how can a weathered wooden door preserve the memory of a
disappearing way of life? Across Doha, Qatar Creates brings art, design and history from around the
globe together to explore how cultures remember their past while imagining their future
By Syed Hasnain Nawab
In an art world saturated with biennials, blockbuster exhibitions and ever-expanding cultural destinations, the challenge for most countries is no longer simply how to attract attention but rather how to give that attention meaning. As museums and institutions across the world compete to shape the cultural conversation, Qatar is pursuing a more enduring ambition: to position itself as a meeting point for histories, artistic traditions and ideas that might otherwise remain worlds apart.
The Qatar Creates Fall/Winter 2026-27 season in Doha brings this ambition into stark focus. Spanning exhibitions, design, fashion, public art and cultural events, the programme brings together exhibitions that might initially seem unrelated. Yet, a common thread runs through them: an interest in how objects carry meaning, how artistic traditions evolve and how cultural identities are shaped through encounters with the wider world.
The Poetry of Nature
At the National Museum of Qatar, the much-sought after Italian artist Giuseppe Penone transforms natural materials into meditations on time, growth and the body. At the heart of Giuseppe Penone: The Inner Flow of Life is a deceptively simple proposition: the boundaries between the human body and the natural world are far less distinct than we imagine.
Associated with Italy's Arte Povera avant-garde art movement, Penone has spent decades investigating the relationship between people, plants and the materials that surround them. The exhibition brings together works from 1970 to 2026 located in various pavilions across the National Museum of Qatar's inner and outer courtyards, organised around materials including leaves, porcelain, thorns, marble and leather.
In Respirare l'ombra (To Breathe the Shadow), laurel leaves enclosed in metal cages are paired with a suspended bronze lung. The juxtaposition connects plant life with human respiration, making visible the biological interdependence that sustains both. In fact, what hits visitors first upon entering this pavilion is the strong aroma from the leaves that hangs densely in the air. The shows co-curator Issa Al Shirawi tells Gen De Art that the intention across all these artworks and their placements through the museum is to "create these meditative moments that simultaneously activate all the senses."
Penone's work is particularly effective because while it is visually spectacular due to its sheer breadth and scope, it also invites close observation. His materials possess histories and processes of their own, with the artist's intervention revealing relationships that might otherwise remain unnoticed. That link between the natural world is integral to his work because, in his words, "the fluidity contained within our bodies permeates the entire universe. It resides in the heart, the air and the water."
As Shirawi puts it, "The show also becomes a dialogue with the Qatari environment." Fittingly, the National Museum of Qatar's architecture draws inspiration from the desert rose, hence adding to the exhibition's implicit dialogue between artistic practice and the surrounding landscape.
The Routes of Cultural Exchange
The movement of objects across borders becomes the central subject of Boats Floating Afar: The Maritime Trade in Ancient Chinese Ceramics, also presented at the National Museum of Qatar, in collaboration with the National Museum of China.
Bringing together more than 100 objects, the exhibition traces approximately a millennium of maritime exchange, following Chinese ceramics from their centres of production to markets across Asia, the Arabian Gulf and beyond.
At the heart of this showcase is a history of movement: of objects crossing oceans, of commercial networks connecting distant societies and of artistic forms travelling far beyond the places in which they were first conceived. The objects on show span the Tang and Qing dynasties, revealing 1,000 years of ceramic production and maritime exchange. Works from celebrated kiln centres reveal the range of Chinese ceramic traditions, from celadon and China's famed bluish-white wares to blue-and-white porcelain and the richly decorated pieces of the Qing period.
The exhibition's wider significance emerges in the evidence it presents of the connections between China and the Gulf long before the emergence of modern global networks. Objects associated with the 10th century Cirebon shipwreck, discovered off the coast of Java, convey the scale of the ceramic trade. Maps chart routes extending from Chinese kiln centres and ports across Asia towards the Arabian Gulf, Africa, Europe and the Red Sea, placing Qatar within a much larger maritime world.
The exhibition therefore challenges the idea that cultural heritage belongs exclusively to the place where an object was made. A ceramic vessel can be simultaneously Chinese in origin and part of a broader history involving the societies that traded, collected and used it, with its meaning expanding as it moved.
Jewellery, Fashion and the Language of Craft
At Doha's design space M7, an extraordinarily arresting exhibition explores the relationship between craftsmanship and cultural storytelling through fashion. ERDEM: About Time, About Her marks the 20th anniversary of fashion designer Erdem Moralioglu's label, bringing together garments, sketches, personal ephemera and atelier materials.
Organised across five thematic chapters, it traces the development of Moralıoğlu's practice, from the early ideas that shaped his aesthetic to the recurring codes that have come to define the world-renowned fashion house ERDEM. The extraordinary exhibition traces the designer's creative development, placing his work alongside paintings, sculptures and decorative arts. Moralioglu's practice draws upon art, literature and history, transforming references from the past into a distinctive contemporary vocabulary.
A stunning recreation of Moralıoğlu's atelier, filled to the brim with sketchbooks, tailoring tools and cloths, greets visitors upon entry. Further in, the labyrinthine interior of this space houses stunning displays that seem ripped straight out of a children's pop-up book or from a technicolour film from the 1940s. Exquisitely detailed interiors serve as receptacles populated by ERDEM's dresses. Through these spaces, the exhibition explores the historical figures and personalities whose lives have inspired the designer, among them the Duchess of Devonshire, opera singer Maria Callas, the ballerina Margot Fonteyn and Queen Elizabeth II.
Also at M7, Around the World in Jewellery examines adornment as a universal human practice, bringing together more than 500 objects from different cultures and historical periods. Organised in collaboration with L'ÉCOLE, School of Jewellery Arts, with support from Van Cleef & Arpels, the exhibition explores how jewellery expresses identity, belief, status and creativity.
Its thematic approach moves beyond the intrinsic value of precious materials. Pearls, shells, coral and other natural elements connect adornment to the environment, while pieces associated with ceremonies and significant life events reveal how jewellery can carry personal and collective memories.
The exhibition's strength lies in the contrasts it creates. Objects from different societies may share materials or forms, yet their meanings are shaped by distinct cultural contexts. Adornment can signify belonging, protection, prestige or remembrance and its significance depends not only on what it is made from but also on who wears it and why.
The Architecture of Memory
At the historic Fahad bin Ali Palace, Beyti Beytak: My Home Is Your Home considers architecture through the ideas of hospitality, belonging and shared experience. Bringing together work by architects and designers from across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, the exhibition proposes that buildings are spaces through which societies organise relationships, express values and sustain collective life.
The exhibition includes work by architects such as Pakistan's Nayyar Ali Dada, India's Raj Rewal and Sri Lanka's Minnette de Silva. Their practices demonstrate the variety of ways architects have negotiated local traditions and modern design. An installation by Iraqi architect Ola Znad, inspired by the communal life and traditional reed construction of southern Iraq's marshlands, further connects architecture with inherited knowledge and collective activity.
The question of how domestic spaces preserve cultural memory is explored more directly in Wooden Doors of Qatar: From Storage to Story. These historic doors reveal the craftsmanship and decorative traditions that once shaped everyday Qatari homes, offering a glimpse into the lives of the people who made and inhabited them.
Fascinatingly, these doors had been lying in storage for decades before they were restored and presented for this exhibition. Ajmal Maiwandi, Chief Executive Officer at the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, which has helped present this exhibition, tells Gen De Art, "Walls are walls, columns are columns, ceilings are ceilings, but doors are where memories, actions and the passage of time are stored. For that reason, these doors had significance to the people that saved them."
Presented in a serpentine manner, one has to snake across from room to room to marvel at each exquisite door, all of which are displayed proudly like a deck of cards standing at an angle. Importantly for Qatar Creates, this exhibition, as Maiwandi reiterates, ties into the notion of cultural exchange: "We know that these doors, or at least the material for these doors, originated elsewhere. And then we look at the design, the iconography, which is often from South Asia, into Central Asia, through Persia, all the way into Egypt, Saudi, and perhaps as far down as Tanzania and Zanzibar. So that's really the radius that we're talking about."
This approach also speaks to the wider programme at play in Doha. Across Qatar Creates, artistic traditions
emerge as resources that artists, designers and communities continually reinterpret. Whether through Penone's natural materials, the journeys of Chinese ceramics or the preservation of Qatari architectural heritage, the past remains present in forms that continue to change.
Ultimately, Qatar Creates is most persuasive when it moves beyond displaying cultural achievements to explore the relationships that give them meaning. Its exhibitions reveal a world shaped by movement, exchange and reinterpretation, in which objects carry histories across generations and borders. In Doha, these encounters offer a reminder that culture is what we as a people choose to preserve, question and transform.
Details
Giuseppe Penone: The Inner Flow of Life at the National Museum of Qatar — 26 October 2026 – 13 February 2027
Boats Floating Afar: The Maritime Trade of Ancient Chinese Ceramics at the National Museum of Qatar — 26 October 2026 – 15 February 2027
Around the World in Jewellery at M7 — 27 October – 26 December 2026
ERDEM: About Time, About Her at M7 — 27 October – 26 December 2026
Beyti Beytak: My Home Is Your Home at Fahad bin Ali Palace — 26 October 2026 – 29 May 2027
Wooden Doors of Qatar: From Storage to Story at Fahad bin Ali Palace — 26 October 2026 – 29 May 2027
The author is an international art writer. He can be reached at hasnain.nawab1@gmail.com
