As Qatar Awaits The World Cup, Doha Shows Off An Array of Cultural Treasures

Doha, a city of roughly 3 million, eagerly awaits the world. Later this month, the capital of Qatar will host the FIFA World Cup, and around 1,000 flights are expected to land in the days prior to its opening.

In Doha, anticipation accompanies ambition: a slate of government-funded projects is transforming the desertscape into a destination capable of dazzling the jet-setting class. The city’s cultural district already includes the newly renovated Museum of Islamic Art, a vast blue-chip public art park, and the National Museum of Qatar. Qatar Creates, a year-round “cultural movement” managed by the state-body Qatar Museums, is busy organizing accompanying programming.

Forthcoming institutions include the Art Mill Museum (AMM), set to open in a converted flour mill which, as of writing, is still operational, and Lusail, a dedicated museum of so-called Orientalist art.

Lusail, which is due to break ground in 2030 on Al Maha Island, a major entertainment destination in Doha, will offer “insight into the movement of ideas and perspectives to reveal complex layers of perception, power and politics, which continue to frame how different people around the world understand each other today,” according to its press materials. 

The team behind Lusail, including director Dr. Xavier Dectot, has organized a teaser exhibition called “Tales of a Connected World.” It includes 247 objects, assembled by Qatar Museums, spanning paintings, drawings, sculpture, and photography, most of which are hung in a dense 19th-century Salon style.  

The show places Qatar within a global trade route where it became a “platform for exchange and debate.” The passing of foreigners through the Orient— Turkey, Greece, the Levant, and North Africa—birthed created this art movement, in which “myths build on myths like a game of telephone,” Dectot said during a tour of the exhibition.

He expanded on the museum’s mission in a statement: “Like Qatar itself, the Lusail Museum will be a platform for exchange and debate, which is especially significant given the new institution’s focus on political, social, and cultural exchange. Reflecting this viewpoint, the building that will serve as a vessel for the museum’s discourse comprises a complex topography: a juxstaposition of fragments of different places and functions.”

There are works by the progenitors of the genre, voluminous odalisques by Eugene Delacroix, a pantomime of an Ottoman noble lady by Jen-Etienne Liotard, and illuminating entries by modern artists such as Matisse and Kandinsky, as well as a substantial film collection: clips, stills, and costume materials from movies like Cleopatra (1963) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) which propagated Orientalist myths.

Titian, ‘Suleyman the Magnificent’, ca. 1540, oil on canvas.

It’s easy, even braced by art historical background, for scrutiny to slip looking at such a sumptuous display. It’ll be the task of the didactics—which will surely be more thorough in the completed museum—to remind the viewer that the world that was, wasn’t quite this.

For the Art Mill Museum, start from above: the country of Qatar is shaped like a thumb, protruding into the Arabian Gulf from the vast masses of Saudi Arabia to the west and the United Arab Emirates to the east. Doha rises on its eastern seafront, and the Qatar Flour Mills extends into the warm waters of the Doha Bay.

This is the beating heart of Qatar, with millions dependent on its furious grind of grain. The need of the people, however, has outpaced its capabilities, so the facility will be retired at some undetermined point before 2030 and a new one is being built to meet the greater need. As of now, not even the architecture firm Elemental, tasked with creating the AMM, knows when production will end.

“We are considering the embedded energy on site. This is the reason why we are keeping as many of the existing structures as possible, because of the energy already present,” lead architect Alejandro Aravena said of the AMM. He added that the team was “not starting from scratch. There were existing structures, and they are spectacular. The DNA of our design starts from the silos of the flour mill.”

Silos in the Qatar Flour Mill, soon to become the Art Mill.

Each of the 40 or so silos of the Qatar Flour Mill is 8 meters in diameter and spaced about 2 meters apart, like a steel redwood forest. New silo-like structures will be loosely placed around the main building to create shade and ventilation. A square of sky provides lights the walking path between the towers. The architectural project is undeniably inspired: the silos will be emptied, and platforms will be built inside to exhibit artwork. Some silos will have one stage to accommodate soaring installations, while other silos can be ascended to discover a succession of artworks. The configuration will change based on the needs of the art, according to Aravena.

He said: “We want the museum to be perceived as if it had always been there. That has been one of the design challenges, arriving at the timelessness of this architecture. That doesn’t only mean that it has to be standing in the next couple of centuries. It also has to come from history of this place, as if it is a natural consequence.”

The whole site is roughly 80,000 square meters, including 23,000 square meters of exhibition space. A special exhibition titled “Art Mill 2030”— the year it’s set to open—is on view now in the mill’s warehouse and explores the development of the museum and its garden. Six artists, two of whom are Qatari, Mohammed Kamal Al Emadi and Amal Al Muftah, were commissioned to create films and photographs for the show.

Shaima Al-Tamimi, a Yemeni and Kenyan artist, focused on the impact of migration on culinary culture through photographs of pita, naan, and other various breads baked in Qatar. For her part, documentarian Al Muftah filmed her grandmother wandering the silos and warehouse, an avatar of the unheralded women’s work of kneading dough, sustaining life. It’s a powerful conceit.

Amal Al Muftah, ‘FiThikra(niyromemfo)’, 2022.

The point of the exhibition is to create links of memory and meaning between the back-breaking work of flour processing and the institution to come. It’s an act of proactive memorializing. However, living monuments of labor are present—literally visible—to visitors, at least on the weekday journalists were invited to the show. A window in the makeshift galleries wall reveals the warehouse bowels, where workers ferry massive bags of grain with forklifts. You can’t reach them. They can’t reach you. But a single yellow hazard light revolves from the forklift’s roof, awkwardly caught in the corner of your eye.

That’s the catch here—or in Abu Dhabi or Dubai or Riyadh.

The cultural institutions in Doha are building exquisite collections and curating thoughtful exhibitions. “No Condition Is Permanent”, a solo show of work by the Palestinian artist Taysir Batniji at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, is a must-see. But the enjoyment of these cultural treasures is soured by a comprised record of human rights violations.

Since Qatar obtained the World Cup bid in 2010, thousands of migrants recruited from Nepal, India, and Bangladesh to build the various soccer stadiums have died, many from poor working conditions exacerbated by the sweltering heat. This project is overseen by the same state body which manages the museums. 

At a panel in October organized by Qatar Creates and held at the Islamic Museum of Art, the moderator described Qatar’s museums as “unburdened by history,” given the age of the country. That’s untrue of any institution and digging into that statement exposes grim ideas of who’s history is worth recording. 

1.2 million people are expected to travel to Qatar for the World Cup. Some of those people will return for future visits, maybe charmed by the elegant Olafur Eliasson installation newly installed in the desert, or how the sun—larger than you’ve ever seen—bleeds the horizon red. It’s worth then repurposing a question posed by Dectot: “With my gaze, what do I perceive of the Other? How is this myth constructed?”