Qatar Museums displayed innovative public artworks in the country, over the weekend. The latest public artwork is among the 40 new major planned works that will come up across the country ahead of the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022. Currently Qatar has over 80 public artworks spread across the country.
The neon public artwork at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art reads “THEY ASKED ME TO CHANGE IT AND I AGREED”. It is by Visual Artist Adel Abidin, who currently resides between Helsinki in Finland and Amman, Jordan.
“Abidin uses his cross-cultural background to create a distinct visual language that is often laced with sarcasm and paradox, while maintaining an ultimately humanistic approach,” said Qatar Museums on its official social media accounts.
It explained that the artist highlights the interlace of Qatar’s larger art institutions and the local community that positions the audience as an integral part of the creative process, presenting the ‘museum’ as a living organic entity rather than just a building.
In a statement, artist Abel Abidin said he was honoured to have his work installed at Mathaf’s building facade. “Art is always about change, the work looks and feels like an extract from a dialogue, An abstract sentence, yet, it opens the window to many interruptions. That would keep people wondering of: what they are asking to change and who?”
He said his artwork was “a take on contemporary art as a collaborative process, based on compromising to reach the right presentation of any hypothesis or visual arguments, that aims to provoke people to think. The choice of having this work installed on a facade of a museum underlines the notion of how art institutions are playing a key role in influencing the conceptual artist’s dialogue with the locals.”
The artist said art institutions nowadays do not follow a classical conservative path. “They are more seeking to create challenges that would put the viewers and locals in a place to be part of the creative process, that they can make a change themselves. Taking the museum itself from the idea of being only a building into a live organic entity that opens wide angles of perceiving the conceptual contemporary art.”
Abidin’s art uses various media including videos, video installations, multimedia sculptures and sound based installations and photography to explore the issues of the contemporary world that we are living in. His main point of departure is always linked to the intention to explore the complex relationship between visual art and politics and identity.
Qatar has promised that fans and visitors arriving for the World Cup will have a unique experience of public art throughout their journey — from their arrival at the airport, metro stations, hotels and fan zones, to the stadiums.
