After a busy fall, the Qatar Museums Authority has announced plans to bring the work of more big-name artists to its exhibition halls next year.

Among the most renowned: American sculptor Richard Serra, who will be featured in two exhibitions in Qatar this spring – the QMA gallery at Katara, and the Al Riwaq Exhibition Hall.

Serra’s artwork is slated to go up on April 2 and run through July 6, 2014. This will be the artist’s first museum exhibition in the Middle East, and will occupy the space currently filled by Damien Hirst’s “Relics.”

Serra’s works tend to revolve around the concepts of space, weight, mass and gravity, and his material of choice is steel. He is known for constructing enormous site-specific installations, including 7, an 80-foot high sculpture composed of seven steel sheets, which was erected at the MIA Park in 2011.

Highlighting Arab artists

New exhibitions will also be set up at the Museum of Modern Arab Art (Mathaf), following the conclusion of Adel Abdessemed’s controversial L’âge d’or, which closes on Jan. 5.

Mona Hatoum, who is of Palestinian origin, will debut “Turbulence,” her largest solo exhibition to date in the Arab world on Feb. 7, showcasing a diversity of her work over the last 30 years.

The exhibition ends on May 18, 2014. According to her biography on White Cube:

Hatoum started her career making visceral video and performance work in the 1980s that focused with great intensity on the body. Since the beginning of the 1990s, her work moved increasingly towards large-scale installations that aim to engage the viewer in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination.

In her singular sculptures, Hatoum has transformed familiar, every-day, domestic objects such as chairs, cots and kitchen utensils into things foreign, threatening and dangerous.

Mathaf’s second spring show will be “Art is one of the roads to Paradise,” highlighting Etel Adnan, a Lebanese-American poet, from March 18 to July 6, 2014.

Meanwhile, the Museum of Islamic Art will feature the exhibition “King and Pawns: Board Games from India to Spain” from March 19 to June 21, 2014.

Chess, backgammon and other board games with Indian and Islamic connections will be on display during this time, as well as related manuals, paintings and illustrated manuscripts.

Do you plan to check out any of these exhibitions? Thoughts?