telling stories through the arts

Culture is multidimensional, and so does QAIC strive to have our programs reflect the same and 2022 saw new and creative means to do so. Art as a representation of culture is at the core of our programming, and art can be a three-dimensional experience. We didn’t want our audience to just look at art; we wanted them immersed in sound, smell, and taste as well.

The Perfumery Museum, which celebrated its oneyear anniversary in May of last year, was woven into our programs throughout 2022, and was the source of inspiration for many additional endeavors. We launched our first public workshop with DIY Scent Studio, inviting guests to learn about the craft of fragrance making, and providing the opportunity to create their own. At our IMPART Summit: Congress for Creatives, we collaborated with the Institute for the Art of Olfaction (IAO) to present an engaging panel featuring experts from around the country. This distinguished panel discussed the trends and innovations in sustainability in the fragrance industry. We look forward to further partnering with IAO in 2023, bringing a cultural delegation to Qatar as well as for a symposium hosted at our headquarters in fall 2023.

Scent is tied to taste and memory, and we decided to have some fun with it in other ways as well. The Alif Ba exhibition, first hosted at the National Children’s Museum in Washington, D.C., introduces young audiences to the Arabic alphabet. Under QAIC’s guardianship, it traveled to two of our program partners in the U.S. First, it stopped at Western Kentucky University, where two of the students in the Arabic Language Program were QAIC fellows in early 2022. Next, it visited Al Bustan Seeds of Culture in Philadelphia, PA. Along the way, QAIC brought our own component to complement the alphabet: corresponding spices and scents, one for each letter. As a visitor was seeing and listening to the letter, they could incorporate the smell of it as well.

In our other exhibitions, we played with the other senses, none more so than in our flagship program, Cultural Crossings: Exchanges Beyond the Silk Road. This playful new program used the narrative of the Silk Road to explore shared cultural heritage along the many countries of the land and sea routes. For 2022, we kicked off with music, hosting several concert events that delighted and educated our guests. The events included oud and sitar demonstrations, ensemble concerts, and in-depth instrument workshops. Our exhibition featured several instruments native to the Arab World and Asia, including qanuns, ouds, sitar and pipa. Altogether, Cultural Crossings told a story that spanned centuries and endures in numerous traditions today.

The exhibitions hosted in 2022 told many other stories as well. The works of four American artists joined the works of their four Qatari counterparts in QAIC’s first traveling exhibition, Women of the Pandemic, hosted at the Katara Cultural Village. With these pieces, the artists’ thoughts, beliefs and feelings traveled with them. Once again, calligraphy proved to be a powerful artistic medium expressed at QAIC several times in 2022, most notably in the Living Line, Living Legacy exhibition and symposium co-produced by the Reed Society for the Sacred Arts.

The FOCI photography program returned for its third year. The submissions told a powerful story about the fragility and beauty of water, tying in with our 2022 theme of sustainability and the arts.

Finally, the stories of the individual and the collective were also on display in our first exhibition for the inaugural IMPART Artist Grant awardees, Josh Berer, Nia Alexander Campbel and Patricia Daher.