Sites of Imagination: Curator’s Letter

When the poet Ibn Raddas collected women’s poetry, his gesture extended beyond preservation. It was, as scholar Moneera Al-Ghadeer points out, an act of remembrance. He documented not only the verses but also the names, tribal affiliations, and places of origin of Bedouin women poets, ensuring they would be remembered, not merely represented. This idea of memory as a poetic and political gesture has shaped my approach to Wafa al-Hamad: Sites of Imagination. Rather than offering a survey or definitive retrospective, the exhibition is a proposition: a site for reencountering a practice that resists easy classification and that has remained underexamined despite its resonance.

The idea for this exhibition was conceived in conversation with Mathaf’s director Zeina Arida and began after curating Lived Forward in 2020, an experimental show that brought together artists from Qatar across generations and built on existing exhibitions. That experience deepened my interest in  recontextualising figures, especially women whose contributions to the cultural landscape of Qatar and the Gulf remain largely unacknowledged. It also raised methodological questions that continue to shape my curatorial research. Wafa al-Hamad, who passed away in 2012, emerged as a pivotal figure. She was an educator, one of the first two Qatari women to earn a degree in art education from Qatar University, and later the first to obtain a PhD in the same field. While a few of her selected works had previously been shown at Mathaf, it soon became clear that her practice extended far beyond those appearances, engaging with conceptual, spiritual, and formal concerns that continue to speak to our moment.

Curating this exhibition also involved close engagement with Wafa’s family and personal archive, including the retrieval of her doctoral dissertation, a key turning point in developing the exhibition’s conceptual structure. Her work moves fluidly across spiritual abstraction, calligraphic experimentation, and dreamlike spatial compositions, often grounded in Gulf architecture and landscape, while opening onto broader metaphysical questions. Her interest in Islamic mafruka or mafrooka, her digital experiments, and her layering of Qur’anic text and rhythm are not discrete phases, but part of a continuous process of visual and conceptual inquiry.

I’m grateful to have worked with a wonderful team, including exhibition designer Waqas Farid, whose exceptional sensitivity to Wafa’s vision helped translate her work into a resonant spatial experience, and Moylin Yuan, who brought the constellation of archives to life.

It was through the words of Madiha Umar, a pioneering artist in the Hurufiyya movement, that I found affirmation of a historical lineage of experimentation among Arab women artists, particularly those working across abstraction and design. Like Umar, Wafa was attuned to the expressive possibilities of form and line. Her engagement with optical illusion was not about visual trickery, but about exploring how rhythm, geometry, and Islamic design traditions could open onto metaphysical and poetic spaces. As Umar once wrote: “No one can deny the melodious values [of design]... the wonderful ingenuity. The subtle balance of the mathematical and the free abstract elements is mystical.” These ideas helped inform the curatorial framework, not as thematic illustration, but as a way of tracing correspondences across generations, mediums, and contexts.

Organised thematically, the exhibition unfolds across three sections: early and mixed-media works reflecting Wafa’s future-oriented vision; pieces rooted in memory and ancestral forms as seen in traditional doors; and works engaged in dialogue with regional modernisms from the Mathaf collection, including Fatima al-Muhib, Balqees Fakhro, Naziha Salim, and Samia Halabi.. From early drawings to late digital experiments, Wafa al-Hamad’s practice invites viewers into sites where familiar forms open onto abstraction, intimacy, and possibility. This exhibition is also an invitation to reconsider how we tell the stories of women artists in the Gulf which are part of the Arab world and identity.

Wafa al-Hamad also stands as an important example of artists from Qatar whose work challenges narrow readings of regional art history. Her practice invites us to embrace alternative late modernisms shaped through local experimentation and personal vision. Sites of Imagination embodies a collective museological methodology rooted in ongoing research, memory, and close engagement, aiming not only to recover but to celebrate these often-overlooked, fluid practices and the vital voices they represent.

Lina Ramadan

Curator and Writer

Lina Ramadan is a guest curator at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art. She is the book editor of Madness of the Anthropocene: Thinking with an Image, an experimental publication featuring invited contemporary artists from the Middle East. She is also currently a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

References

Al-Ghadeer, Moneera. “Nomadic Histories: Reflections on Bedouin Women’s Poetry from the Gulf Region.” In Gulf Women, edited by Amira El-Azhary Sonbol, 125–146. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012.

Al Mannai, K. M. A. The Ten [Women] Pioneers of Plastic Arts in Qatar. Doha: The National Council for Culture, Arts and Heritage, 2008.

Umar, Madiha. “Arabic Calligraphy: An Inspiring Element in Abstract Art (1949–50).” In Primary Documents: Modern Art in the Arab World, edited by Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Rogers, and Nada Shabout, 139–142. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2018.