Tasweer Photo Festival Qatar Returns

Olafur Eliasson, Your pearl garden, 2023. Galvanised steel, textile (white, anthracite), solar lamp, glass spheres (various sizes), silver, paint (black, yellow), 380 x 950 x 950 cm.

Photograph by Ali Faisal Al Anssari. Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.

Olafur Eliasson’s The Curious Desert

For its second edition, the biennial Tasweer Photo Festival Qatar returns this year from March 15 to May 20 once again demonstrating its valuable role as a platform and support for photographers and photographic communities in Qatar and the Western Asia and North Africa (WANA) region. Developed by Qatar Museums and led by Her Excellency Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the festival aims to foster personal and professional creative growth for photographers and imagemakers in the region, while nurturing artistic talent and developing Qatar’s arts economy. The programme features exhibitions, awards, commissions, collaborations, presentations, and workshops that highlight diverse practices and dialogues. Among the festival’s opening exhibitions are Doha Fashion Fridays and A Chance to Breathe, along with site-specific exhibitions that include My Mother Lulwa’s House and And Thereafter, and the Mathaf exhibition I Am The Traveler And Also The Road, featuring photographic projects created by WANAbased artists.

Hadeer Omar, And Thereafter

This photo – Olafur Eliasson, The living lighthouse, 2023. Steel, wood, paint (black), colour-effect filter glass ( various colours), HMI lamps, motors, tripod, cables, electrical ballast, dimensions variable. “Olafur Eliasson: The Curious Desert, National Museum of Qatar, Doha, 2023”. Photo: Anders Sune Berg. Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles

Right - Olafur Eliasson, Eye see you, 2006. Stainless steel, aluminium, colour-effect filter glass, monofrequency bulb 230 x 120 x 110 cm, Photo: Anders Sune Berg, Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles

Titled ‘The Curious Desert’, the first solo exhibition in the Gulf region for IcelandicDanish artist Olafur Eliasson invites you to explore indoors and outdoors across two locations from March 19. An extensive display at the National Museum of Qatar encompasses meditative light installations, geometric models, photo series, watercolours and a sprawling research map that is a work in progress, while close to the Al Thakhira Mangrove in Northern Qatar a dozen new site-specific installations –an artistic laboratory in the desert, according to the artist - are waiting to be discovered. In the artist’s words: “The Curious Desert asks how we use vi-sion and movement to make sense of our worlds; to make invisible phenomena visible and palpable; and to collect knowledge, engage in critical reflection, and construct worlds based on the stories that we live each day.”

‘Beirut and the Golden Sixties: A Manifesto of Fragility’

Titled ‘Beirut and the Golden Sixties: A Manifesto of Fragility’, a new multidisciplinary exhibition at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art opened on March 17, exploring a turbulent chapter in the development of modernism in Lebanon and the burgeoning Beirut art scene of the 1960s. Co-curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, the exhibition features 230 artworks and 300 archival documents drawn from nearly 40 collections worldwide, including eight works from Mathaf’s own collection, and a number of archival documents that provide additional understanding of the artists’ practices. Here, Selections talks to cocurator Sam Bardaouil in an exclusive interview.

What was the concept behind this exhibition?

Beirut and The Golden Sixties is an exhibition that is built on two lines. On the one hand, it is a celebration and acknowledgement of all the important artists that made

Beirut that special place that we all know and think about. At the same time, it is a cautionary tale. If Beirut was indeed such a great place and we had that golden age, then how come there was a civil war that occurred in 1975 which had repercussions that are very much still felt with us to this day? So, these two lines compete, converge and diverge in this exhibition, leading us all the way to 1975 and the aftermath of the war, which unfortunately has its repercussions evident in the Beirut Port blast of 2020.

What do you personally hope to achieve from this exhibition in Doha?

I think that bringing this show to Doha is important because you’re placing the exhibition along with the artists and works within a collection in an institution that is trying to push the discourse and open up the narrative about the history of modernity in the region.

For instance, there are works in this exhibition that we took from the collection in dialogue with the works that we have from very important lenders such as the Dalloul Foundation, Barjeel Foundation and many others. To see these works side by side in the context of a place that is about advancing the discourse on the contributions of this part of the world to the language and practice of modernity and art in particular is very important. I hope this will be one of the steppingstones in the history of this institution in the work that they do.

Will this exhibition continue touring?

This is the last stop. This exhibition was conceived for the Lyon Biennial. It opened initially in Berlin and then went to Lyon as part of the biennial whose title is “Manifesto of Fragility”.

So, the idea was taking Beirut as an example of a city that is fragile but perhaps due to its fragility, it keeps on persevering and connecting the people who are somehow related to it because that is what binds us all together: our fragility.

What are your expectations for how this exhibition will be received in Qatar?

It is too early to tell because we just opened the exhibition. However, generally, what this show can hopefully do is something that we need to do more of in Lebanon. If we go to Lebanon, not one place exists where we can look at what happened in that war to draw any conclusions or lessons. There is no place of remembrance nor of accountability. This exhibition could somehow evoke certain incidents that led us to where we ended up back then but also to where we are today. It is a very important exercise in self-reflection and I think this is what drew me to this project in the first place. I learned so many new things I didn’t know, and from another perspective it was a way of rethinking a lot of things I thought I knew.