Building on the success of the 2015 inaugural programme, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha organises its second Curatorial Summer Camp from September 4-9.
The camp highlights Mathaf’s commitment to exploring artistic production and curatorial practices, and builds on the history of curatorial, educational and community engagement programmes designed by the museum to stimulate creativity, enquiry, appreciation and debate around modern and contemporary art in the region.
Local and regional curators are invited to participate in the six-day camp that includes a series of lectures, talks, discussions, tours and other creative presentations by curators and professionals in the field.
Guest lecturers this year include curators Vasif Kortun, director of Research and Programmes of SALT Istanbul; and Kristine Khouri, independent researcher and curator. They join Mathaf director Abdellah Karroum, museum’s curators and local archive specialists to participate in a variety of sessions during the Curatorial Summer Camp. Topics addressed in the programme include curating archives, artist’s archives and regionally specific possibilities for documenting, archiving and sharing histories of cultural production, exhibitions and other creative encounters in the Arab region.
Members of Qatar’s artistic and creative community participated in 2015’s successful three-month programme that featured a number of presentations and workshops delivered by curators including Carolyn Christov–Bakargiev, Juan Gaitan, Jean-Hubert Martin and Egyptian artist Wael Shawky, with Mathaf curators and educators.“Our curatorial summer camp follows initiatives such as Project Space, dedicated to new tendencies in artistic production and emerging curatorial practices and highlights the role that the museum plays as a site of knowledge production and debate, and our commitment to sharing new perspectives on art in relation to its contexts,” Mathaf director Abdellah Karroum said.
The programme interrogates curatorial thinking and practices to introduce ideas and debates on art discourse and the practical application of curating. The programme is open to local and regional creative professionals, students and scholars interested in developing a contemporary critical discourse on practices in art and curating.
Those interested in applying should e-mail a one page letter of interest, CV and a 250 word curatorial proposal related to curating archives, to: MathafCuratorialTeam@qm.org.qa by August 18.
The Curatorial Summer Camp initiative comes as part of Mathaf’s ongoing curatorial and research project, Doha Art Map, a collaborative mapping experiment to locate creativity and artistic production in Doha.