Current Exhibitions At Mathaf: Arab Museum Of Modern Art | All & About

M. F. HUSAIN: HORSES OF THE SUN
21 March – 31 July 2019
 Location: Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Atrium and Galleries 4, 5 and 6

Maqbool Fida Husain (1913-2011) was a legendary figure in the history of Indian modernism. A founding member of the Progressive Artists Group, formed in Bombay in 1947, Husain played a leading role in revolutionising art in India by parting ways with the dominant genres of academic painting and miniaturist nostalgia.When he died in London at the age of 98, his life had already traced an Arc through one of the most cataclysmic yet vibrant centuries in human history. His chosen media ranged from oil painting andwatercolour, through lithography and serigraphy, to sculpture, architecture and installation. He was also a film-maker, poet and memoirist who wrote in Urdu, Hindi and English. Husain called himself a global nomad developing strong connections with the UK, the USA, Czechoslovakia, the Arab world in general, and Qatar in particular, which offered him refuge when adverse political circumstances forced him into exile from his beloved India. The exhibition presents his pluralist approach to the divine and cosmic aspects of being, articulated through the myths, symbols and narratives of the world’s religions and philosophies. M. F. Husain: Horses of the Sun bears witness to a recurrent motif in his art, a personal symbol of self-renewal and vitality.

Curator, Ranjit Hoskote
Assistant Curator, Wadha Al-Aqeedi

RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE: STILL MORE WORLD

21 March 2019 – 31 July 2019
Location: Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha

Raqs Media Collective was founded in 1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. The collective’s artistic practice examines questions of the everyday, alongside philosophical and historical inquiries of the universe. Unravelling structures of economies, time, and language, their work examines the shifting state of contemporary life and boundaries of visibility. This exploration of transformation, is embedded in the process and subject of their work, and in the collective’s name ‘raqs’a term for movement and whirling, in Urdu/Hindustani, Arabic, and Persian. The exhibition draws on the energy of Doha’s urban landscape of light, which symbolises this global city in continuous movement, its networks of people, and raw materials. Thirteen installations ranging from videos, to textiles and sculptures made between 2011 and 2019 are presented at Mathaf across the city of Doha. A part of the series Dohas for Doha (2019) will be displayed on Burj Doha from March 20 – April 3 2019 to mark the conversation between Raqs and the city. The works in this exhibition re-examine human progress and natural resources, considering historical and contemporary movements of people and the way terrains change. Still More World offers a rephrasing of the prevailing sensibility, embodying the double bind of humanity’s present condition; the promise and desire for growth coupled with the question of how much more the earth has left to give.