All photos courtesy of Mathaf

For the next four months, the Doha-based Arab Museum of Modern Art (Mathaf) has reserved its ground floor exhibition space for solo exhibitions that showcase the work of five artists from the region.

From today until Feb. 14 next year, Focus: Works from the Mathaf Collection will feature the work of Qatar’s Faraj Daham, Lebanese artist Saloua Raouda Choucair, Egypt’s Inji Efflatoun, Farid Belkahia of Morocco and Abdulhalim Al-Radwi from Saudi Arabia.

Each artist’s work has been assembled by a different curator, and will remain part of Mathaf after the exhibition concludes.

In a statement on its website, Mathaf said:

“In different ways and with different forms, these five artists have played a major part in generating ideas and inventing techniques as they, in conversation with international art movements and other geographies, make sense of their artistic, social, and political worlds.”

Entry to the exhibition is free.

Opening hours are 11am to 6pm daily except Monday when the museum is closed. On Fridays, Mathaf is open from 3pm to 8pm.

Museum ‘Oscars’ award

Mathaf’s announcement of these new solo exhibitions follows its recent success at the prestigious Leading Cultural Destination (LCD) Awards on Oct. 9.

There, the museum won the regional award in the “best emerging culture destination” category, beating out Dubai’s Moving Image Museum and Salsali Private Museum, as well as Oman’s National Museum in Muscat.

Although the Museum of Islamic Art was also shortlisted in the awards for “best architecture and spatial design,” it lost to the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.

Leading Cultural Destinations, a 15-year old company and quarterly magazine dedicated to bespoke travel and destination experiences, runs the awards, which are considered the “Oscars” for museums around the world.

Do you plan to check out the new exhibits at Mathaf? Thoughts?