DOHA: The ambitious new quadrennial Rubaiya Qatar opens this November across the country and its capital Doha, and its headline exhibition, “Unruly Waters,” promises to be a major intervention in contemporary curation.
The show has four curators: Tom Eccles (executive director, Center for Curatorial Studies and the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College); Ruba Katrib (chief curator and director of curatorial affairs, MoMA PS1); Mark Rappolt (editor-in-chief of ArtReview and ArtReview Asia); and Shabbir Hussain Mustafa (chief curator, Singapore Art Museum),
It features more than 50 artists and includes over 20 new commissions produced for the project. The show offers both a literal and metaphorical examination of water.
“Water is a kind of foil to talk about something else,” said Eccles at a briefing panel held alongside Art Basel Qatar last week, signaling a show that will use seas, currents and maritime histories to open conversations about trade, migration, ecology and cultural exchange.
The curators’ research was sparked, in part, by a maritime find now in Qatar’s collections: a shipwreck off the coast of Sumatra that yielded tens of thousands of objects and traced routes across the historic Maritime Silk Road.
