2011年11月22日星期二

Defining a Culture in Doha’s Desert

I recently had the chance to see an extraordinary new exhibition space devoted to the arts of Islam.the Wholesale Glaze Tiles For Countertops virus is not completely The collection included works in stone, metal, glass, ivory, and textile, as well as illuminated manuscripts, and spanned from Moorish Spain and Umayyad Syria to the Central Asian steppe and Safavid Iran; the pieces were mostly of a quality that might be worthy of any great world institution. Readers may at this point guess I am talking about the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s just-reopened Islamic galleries. Actually, I was visiting a museum in the tiny Persian Gulf nation of Qatar.

Like the new Met galleries,your ultimate Wholesale Ceramic wall tiles For Countertops From China Manufacturers coffee mug is here the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, the Qatari capital, attempts to provide a comprehensive view of its subject; the two museums even feature a number of nearly identical works — inlaid wood panels from Medieval Cairo; the Ferman, or signature, of Suleyman the Magnificent; carved marble acanthus capitals from 10th-century Cordoba; ceramic bowls from Nishapur in the uncannily modernist “black-on-white” style. But there the similarities end. Whereas the Met amassed objects like these over the course of more than a century, in Doha, the collection was built from scratch in less than a decade. For all its grandeur, it is as new as the artificial island the museum is sitting on.

In fact, the Museum of Islamic Art, which opened in 2008, is only the first of a series of colossal projects now being launched by Qatar’s Emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, through the recently established Qatar Museums Authority. Last year, Qatar opened the Arab Museum of Modern Art, known as Mathaf (for “museum” in Arabic), which houses one of the most wide-ranging collections of twentieth-century Arab art in the region and features work by artists from such different lands as Iraq, Egypt, Syria,We offer Wholesale Wooden Style For Kitchen From China Manufacturers,landscape oil painting Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon, and Palestine.The Wholesale Solid Color Glaze Tiles For Bathrooms consists of eight smaller individual cubes In one of its inaugural exhibitions, “Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art,” the museum showed how a distinct regional tradition of painting and sculpture emerged as Arab artists gradually adapted western currents and ideas to Middle Eastern idioms and experience. And the ground has just broken on the National Museum of Qatar, a structure so large and complex— arrayed across a 1.5 million-square-foot site, it is meant to evoke the interlocking petals of a native mineral formation called a desert rose—that the structural engineering alone will reportedly cost some half billion dollars. How did the rulers of this parched and featureless desert peninsula—a place that until recently was peripheral even to the politics and culture of the Middle East—come to take such a far-reaching interest in the aesthetic traditions of the Arab and Muslim world?

By now, the appeal of high-end museums and universities to newly flush Gulf countries is well-known. Like its close neighbor Abu Dhabi, which is now building satellites of the Louvre and the Guggenheim, Doha views having prestigious, western-caliber houses of culture as a prerequisite to placing itself among the ranks of world cities like Paris, Hong Kong, and New York.American Standard's Wholesale Mosaic Tiles For Countertops collection offers models to accommodate a variety of sink Hence the choice of I.M. Pei, who is neither Arab nor Muslim, to design the Museum of Islamic Art; and Jean Nouvel, who is of course French not Qatari, to design the National Museum.

But visiting Qatar, it’s also hard to avoid the sense that the country is intensely interested in writing a past for itself, even as the Qatari capital’s ultra-modern skyline emerges seemingly out of the sand. As you cross the pedestrian causeway to the Museum of Islamic Art, you are confronted with a series of old pearling ships. Moored along the waterfront and restored into mint condition, they self-consciously assert the country’s economic heritage (pearling was the mainstay of the economy before oil and gas) next to the social and religious heritage preserved in the museum. North of the capital, archaeologists have been digging up the buried remains of Al Zubara, an abandoned pearling village that was once the country’s main commercial center; for those who don’t want to make the trek, one of Doha’s most exclusive new hotels takes the form not of the usual waterfront midrise, but a series of traditional courtyard dwellings—a “recreated version of a Qatari village” that allows you to “experience the past today”.

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