Bu'ed Nadhar "Beyond immediate vision"

Curatorial Statement

Bu’ed Nadhar is the understanding that design extends beyond form and function. It is a way of seeing, shaped by resilience, continuity, and the ability to look beyond immediate vision.

It is about reading what came before, imagining what comes next, and recognising what deserves to endure while allowing space for transformation.

Resilience is rooted in intention. Flexibility becomes a form of wisdom. Craft carries memory through hands, materials, and generations. Design carries culture forward while remaining open to change.

Bu’ed Nadhar invites a design practice that is grounded in its origins while embracing new possibilities. It values continuity without resisting evolution, and preserves meaning as ideas, materials, and traditions take on new forms.

Curator: Aisha Nasser Al Sowaidi (Director, Liwan Design Studios and Labs and Curator)

Bu’ed Nadhar probes craft as a living archive, where material intelligence intersects with ecological and social knowledge, and heritage is continually reinterpreted in relation to contemporary contexts. Designers engage

with Qatar’s landscape, sourcing local materials such as clay, palm leaves, wood, fibres, and sand, integrating desert ecology and environmental conditions into strategies. This approach connects craft histories to present practice, highlighting how tradition, material exploration, and postcolonial perspectives inform resilient, adaptive, and contextually grounded design.

The exhibition considers Qatar as a site of production, looking closely at the places, materials, industries and forms of knowledge that enable design to be made locally. Designers worked with locally sourced materials, expertise and production facilities, moving through the Industrial Area, workshops and prototyping facilities, and Qatar’s natural landscapes. Through the act of making, the exhibition examines Qatar as a landscape, a material condition, and an evolving urban narrative.

The five residences include:

Ideas FROMM. Industry Residency in collaboration with residency lead FROMM.

Shaping and Crafting the Future Residency in collaboration with residency lead Campus MaNa

Liwan Craft Residency—Oasis: Our Design Ecosystem by residency lead and curator Asma Derouiche and Hayakum by project lead Cristián Mohaded

Athar by Noora Al Melhim

Bar-Bahr by Jassim Al Nasrallah

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