It is a bold title for an anniversary exhibition: ‘Resolutions’. Yet boldness has always been coded into Mathaf’s DNA. As the museum marks 15 years, the show’s title lands with intention: a nod to revisiting its foundations while setting its gaze firmly on the future. ‘The curators wanted to reflect,’ says Zeina Arida, Mathaf’s director since 2021, ‘and the word “resolution” is also about looking towards the future.’ But to look forward, Mathaf must first look inward – back to its improbable beginnings, its original vision, and the promises that shaped its founding.

It is impossible to speak about Mathaf without invoking the force behind it: Sheikh Hassan bin Mohammed bin Ali Al Thani. To call him a collector is to diminish the magnitude of his contribution. His is a story that borders on legend. For decades, he quietly assembled what is today the largest and most extensive collection of Arab Modernist art anywhere in the world. Ten thousand artworks – an anthology of the history of the Arab world from the late 1800s through the 1980s – form the foundation upon which Mathaf stands. As the art historian and scholar Dr. Nada Shabout, who currently heads the al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art in Abu Dhabi, puts it: ‘It is the best collection of Modern Arab art on the planet. There is nothing like it anywhere and no one will be at the level of Mathaf.’ Sultan Al Qassemi, founder of the Barjeel Art Foundation – another notable vault of Arab Modernist art – seconds Shabout: ‘Mathaf’s collection of pan-Arab art is unrivaled in the region and spans the breadth and width of not only the Arab world but also extends into neighboring countries.’

In truth, Mathaf existed long before 2010, when the museum acquired its official name and home. Its spirit emerged years earlier, during the Second Gulf War, when Sheikh Hassan invited Iraqi artists – struggling under sanctions and unable to work – to Doha, offering them two villas to live and create in. Giants like Dia Azzawi, Ismail Fattah, and Shakir Hassan Al Said produced some of their career-defining work there. ‘It was Mathaf before it was Mathaf,’ says Shabout, who encountered Sheikh Hassan’s initiative while she was completing her doctoral research in the US. He called her to say he wanted the world to see his collection, and wanted to open a museum. She flew to Doha and became integral to defining the museum’s intellectual backbone – shaping acquisitions, filling historical gaps, and articulating the institution’s identity. Known as ‘Mathaf’s godmother,’ she even coined the language that has held ever since: Mathaf is the Arab Museum of Modern Art.

Shabout curated two of Mathaf’s landmark opening exhibitions in 2010 – ‘Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art’ and ‘Interventions’ – where one gallery, tellingly titled ‘Doha’, showcased the masterpieces produced by the artists who once lived and worked in Sheikh Hassan’s villas.

The third opening exhibition, the unforgettable ‘Told, Untold, Retold’, curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, was staged at Al Riwaq and is widely regarded as a career-defining moment for the curators and participating artists. A major exhibition space operated by Qatar Museums, the 5,000 m² Al Riwaq became known as the arena for major international shows, while Mathaf – housed in a former school building in Doha’s Education City – was often perceived as the stepchild. Then came shifting political tides: budget cuts, leadership changes, and regional ruptures.

In 2021, Zeina Arida – formerly director of the Sursock Museum in Beirut – took over the directorship of Mathaf from Moroccan Abdellah Karroum, who had led it for nearly 8 years and helped steer the institution through that period of reflection and recalibration. Now the art world waits in anticipation for the new direction under her leadership, sensing that Mathaf’s most defining chapters may still lie ahead. The move from Sursock to Mathaf, says Arida, ‘was a natural progression.’ After all, both are, in many ways, cousin museums rooted in the history of Arab Modernism. The 15th anniversary offers a symbolic moment to realign Mathaf with its founding intentions. An encyclopedia of Modern Arab art, initiated years ago by Shabout and put on pause – due to institutional restructuring, shifting strategic priorities, and broader budgetary limitations affecting Qatar’s cultural institutions in the mid to late 2010s – is being revived. A major expansion, led by architect Lina Ghotmeh, will (re)introduce artist residencies, studios, and a library-café designed as a home for students, researchers, and the wider community. ‘Mathaf is a museum in movement, a living museum, and it’s a challenge to remain relevant,’ says Arida.

Publications are next – an essential step for a museum sitting on the richest repository of Arab Modernism on earth. And yet, only a fraction of the collection is visible. ‘Mathaf currently showcases around 100 artworks, which is approximately 1% of its collection,’ points out Al Qassemi. ‘It is in desperate need of a venue several times the size of the current museum to showcase a larger display of its vast collection.’ The museum continues to loan works – to Shabout’s show on the Baghdad Modern Art Group that debuted at Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College in August, to Adriano Pedrosa’s 2024 Venice Biennale, and beyond – but the world still knows only a sliver of what Mathaf holds.

To celebrate its 15th anniversary, Mathaf presents two exhibitions. The first, ‘Resolutions’, turns the museum itself into the subject – its origins, its mission, its foundational figures, and its evolving history. Rich with artworks, archives, films, and rare recorded interviews with Sheikh Hassan, the exhibition offers unprecedented insight into the birth of the Arab world’s most important Modern art collection. Its four chapters explore Mathaf as a legacy of artistic migration, an institutional memory, a generator of knowledge, and a space for articulating Arab identity.

The second exhibition, ‘We Refuse_d’, emerged from conversations between Arida and scholar-curator Nadia Radwan following last year’s cancellation of Samia Halaby’s exhibition at the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University. The show was inspired by the 19th century ‘Salon des Refusés’, explain the co-curators Radwan and Vasif Kortun in a note published on Mathaf’s website. ‘In the context of the geopolitical divide generated by the genocidal war on Palestine, artists, academics, writers, and musicians have been cancelled, censored, discredited, threatened, and have faced financial retribution and condemnation,’ they continue. 'In reaction, many artists have decided to withdraw from exhibitions and cultural events, often at the expense of their careers. [...] We decided to treat refusal as a potential for action, resistance, and repair, and, overall, as a way of claiming agency.’

‘We Refuse_d’ brings together 15 artists whose work confronts censorship, displacement, endurance, and the political stakes of making art under pressure. It is sharp, timely, and urgent. In many ways, these two shows – one backward-looking, one defiantly present – capture Mathaf’s dual nature: a museum rooted in a colossal past and one continuously negotiating its place in a turbulent present. Fifteen years on, Mathaf remains unfinished – ambitious, necessary, and still evolving. Its greatest resolutions, perhaps, are yet to come.