February 24th marked the opening of the first edition of Design Doha, a brand-new biennial that sees Qatar as a catalyst for design debate in the Middle East and North African regions. In addition to showcasing the most innovative fruits of the work of the area's designers, artisans, artists, and architects, the initiative by Qatar Museums President Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, with the artistic direction of U.S.-based curator Glenn Adamson, aims to create a platform for exchange with the international scene with an educational mission.
Arab design? It’s mind-blowing! 5 must-see exhibitions in Design Doha
We visited the Qatari capital and global center of Arab creativity. The new biennial is a collection of experiences crowning the cultural investments of the past decades.
(February 24th – August 5th, 2024)
© Edmund Sumner, Courtesy Qatar Museums
© Edmund Sumner, Courtesy Qatar Museums
© Edmund Sumner, Courtesy Qatar Museums
(February 24th – March 30th, 2024)
© Julián Velásquez, Courtesy Qatar Museums
© Julián Velásquez, Courtesy Qatar Museums
© Julián Velásquez, Courtesy Qatar Museums
(February 24th – March 30th, 2024)
© Julián Velásquez, Courtesy Qatar Museums
© Julián Velásquez, Courtesy Qatar Museums
© Julián Velásquez, Courtesy Qatar Museums
(February 24th – August 5th, 2024)
© Julián Velásquez, Courtesy Qatar Museums
© Julián Velásquez, Courtesy Qatar Museums
© Julián Velásquez, Courtesy Qatar Museums
(February 24th – March 30th, 2024)
© Julián Velásquez, Courtesy Qatar Museums
© Julián Velásquez, Courtesy Qatar Museums
© Julián Velásquez, Courtesy Qatar Museums
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- Giulia Ricci
- 07 March 2024
Design Doha is but the latest and most substantial cultural investment Qatar made in the country. In fact, in the past few decades, Qatar has been the epicenter of global-scale events such as the 2022 World Cup and Expo 2023. This effort has resulted in some of the most ambitious architecture in recent years: in addition to stadiums, both museums and cultural facilities take center stage. Illustrious names including I. M. Pei, Jean-François Bodin, Ibrahim Al Jaidah, OMA, and Ateliers Jean Nouvel will be joined in the coming years by Alejandro Aravena's Elemental studio, OMA once again, Herzog & de Meuron, and UNStudio, the latter being the designer behind the capital's subway.
In contrast, the M7 museum, the beating heart of Design Doha, was completed in 2021 by British studio John McAslan + Partners within the new Msheireb Downtown Doha district. The biennial consists of a series of exhibitions that will run until August 5th, 2024, complemented by events, talks, and workshops. These include, at Liwan Design Studios and Labs, the Design Doha Exchange residency program curated by Gwen Farrelly and Ghada Al Khater. Entitled "Crafting Design Futures," this residency program stems from the cultural twinning that Qatar initiates with a different country each year, with Morocco as a partner in 2024.
At Design Doha, design is a multifaceted toolkit, in touch with the sister disciplines of architecture and art. The broad field of design is related to an innovation that, yes, passes through new technologies but, above all, through a diversity of craft practices still deeply rooted in the Arab world. This is the key that allows the emergence of solid, contemporary outcomes, that at the same time are mindful of very different traditions, specific to each country. Design is also a tool for finding oneself in a community, where the designer is a reactivator of pre-existing economies related to craftsmanship. This is the case with French Moroccan artist Sara Ouhaddou, who devotes ten years to each project she activates in Morocco. Her collaborations are opportunities for formal and process innovations in artisans' ateliers, aiming at renewing the language and then returning them to a new autonomy. Or, again, design slips between the tight meshes of ecology, creating new materials from the waste of human production activities, such as Syrian designer Talin Hazbar's materials made from cages and ropes extracted from the seabed in collaboration with the Dubai Diving Volunteering Team. Design Doha sees design as a broad platform, an agent of change, perhaps more so than the corresponding Western events.
Opening image: © Edmund Sumner
Jordanian curator Rana Beiruti's exhibition is the mainstay of Design Doha. The choral narrative of more than 70 designers includes Sabil by Jordanian Dina Haddadin;Sites – New Sites, casts produced by Bahrain-based Studio Anne Holtrop; an installation by Salima Naji, who has been conducting experiments on Morocco’s vernacular architecture for years; lights by Lebanese Samer Saadeh, founder of Fabraca Studios; An Archive for Modern Glass by Bricklab and 6: AM, a mix between the Jeddah’s Brutalism and Venetian glass; three micro-architectures by Civil architecture (Kuwait-Bahrain), AAU Anastas (Palestine), and Sahel Alhiyari (Jordan); and a material, Sediments by Talin Hazbar, made of ropes and fishing cages recovered from the Persian Gulf.
(February 24th – August 5th, 2024)
Artistic director Glenn Adamson told Domus that the project is “the emotional heart of the biennial”. Placed within the scenic setting of M7's as-yet unfinished theater, “Weaving Poems” is a touching installation by Maryam Omar, an Afghan designer living in Amman. The installation consists in a collaboration with a group of Afghan women weavers from Bamiyan province, who produced a collection of rugs inspired by the area’s natural and cultural landscapes. In Afghanistan, the craftswomen interpreted with fabric Omar’s digitally edited watercolors. The objects float in the shaded space, accompanied by photographs and sound recordings of the artisans at work. The installation was coordinated by Turquoise Mountain, a nonprofit founded in 2006 by King Charles III.
(February 24th – March 30th, 2024)
The exhibition curated by Glenn Adamson and Peter Tamas Nagy explores of the global connections that have produced Qatar’s current architectural heritage. Since the 1930s, when the first oil fields were discovered in the country, a variety of influences, such as Art Deco, Classicism, and Brutalism, have converged in Doha. The latter category includes historic buildings, such as the Sheraton Hotel by American William L. Pereira and the Ministry of the Interior by Lebanese William Sednaoui, converted in 2022 into The Ned Hotel by David Chipperfield Architects.
(February 24th – March 30th, 2024)
In collaboration with the American University in Cairo, the installation-exhibition on the ground floor of M7 displays a collection of 100 posters selected through competitions from the 100/100 Hundred Best Arabic Posters platform. The jury was made up of the group’s co-directors, Jochen Braun, Ryan Vincente Lee Grees, and Regina Rammelt, who sifted through thousands of submissions from 23 countries. The presented work displayed a vibrant portrait of contemporary graphic culture in the Arab world.
(February 24th – August 5th, 2024)
In recent years, Uzbekistan’s Art and Culture Development Foundation has promoted initiatives that straddle contemporary and traditional, such as its most recent participations in the Venice Biennale. In Doha, the foundation is proposing an exhibition that chronicles craftmanship heritage through 50 historical objects that span from silk and cotton textiles to wood carving. This includes a collaboration with Lebanese designer Nada Debs, who, together with Uzbek craftsman Sirojiddin Rahmatillaev, created a contemporary version of the topchan, a type of outdoor seat widespread in Central Asia. Serving as a hyper-contemporary backdrop is the “optical weaving” designed by Sheperd Studio (Bahrain), which projected 31,000 lenticular elements with iridescent colors taken from the objects on display on the floor of the M7 spaces.
(February 24th – March 30th, 2024)