Exhibitions and creative presentations highlight the Qatar, Canada and Mexico 2026 Year of Culture while looking ahead to Egypt and Greece in 2027
Doha, Qatar, 03 November: Years of Culture will celebrate the Qatar, Canada and Mexico 2026 Year of Culture through exhibitions and creative presentations at MIHAD Gallery, QC+’s contemporary commercial art and design gallery in Doha Design District. Opening on 5 November 2026, the exhibitions form part of a wider programme spanning art, design, and culinary experiences, highlighting the role of creativity in connecting people and cultures. The programme will also introduce audiences to creative voices from Egypt and Greece, providing a glimpse into Qatar’s 2027 Year of Culture.
Years of Culture Advisor on Latin America Mohammed Jassim Al
Throughout the programme, artists and designers consider how landscapes shape identity, script carries cultural knowledge, and handmade objects preserve memory. These themes connect distinct creative practices while giving visitors an accessible starting point for encounters with the cultures of Qatar and its partner countries.
Mexican creativity will be featured in MIHAD’s wider programme through ceramics by designer Perla Valtierra in the gallery’s retail and collectible design selection. A culinary presentation by Panadería Rosetta, Chef Elena Reygadas’s Mexico City bakery, running from 5 – 15 November 2026, extends the exchange into food traditions, connecting the cultural year with the objects and experiences of everyday life.
rooted/ elsewhere
The exchange between Qatar and Canada takes shape in rooted/ elsewhere, which brings together Canadian artists Joanna Johnston, Tessar Lo, and Karl Mata Hipol with Qatari artists Wadha Alathba, Amna Al Baker and Hamad AlFayhani. Working across photography, textiles, and mixed media, they explore landscape as a source of memory, identity and belonging.
Familiar plants, animals, terrain, and textures provide a shared visual language through which different personal histories and environments come into conversation. Moving between close observation and remembered places, the exhibition considers how people carry the landscapes of home into new surroundings and how a sense of belonging can encompass more than one geography.
Johnston’s atmospheric photographs draw on the Canadian Prairies and her experiences of living abroad. Philippine-born Canadian artist Hipol combines archival imagery, painting and Ilocano Abel weaving traditions to explore migration and Filipino identity within the Canadian landscape. Indonesian-born, Toronto-based artist Tessar Lo explores memory and perception through layered paintings that draw on his Asian heritage and blur the boundaries between everyday experience and imagined worlds. Their works sit alongside the Qatari artists’ reflections on local ecology, nature and the emotional associations of place.
Beyond the Letters
Beyond the Letters, presented in collaboration with Design Doha Biennale and curated by Basma Hamdy and Ali Asali, explores Arabic and Persian typography through its historical, geographical, spiritual, and performative contexts. The exhibition invites visitors to encounter lettering as a visual, tactile, and spatial experience, showing how script can carry cultural knowledge and personal expression across different forms of making.
Woven and printed tapestries, embroidered textiles, illuminated works, sculpture, jewellery, and experimental publications sit alongside audiovisual and digital installations. As letterforms move into material, light, and movement, the exhibition brings established traditions into conversation with contemporary approaches to design and artistic practice.
The exhibition will also feature the work of Canada-based interdisciplinary artist and researcher Arshia Sobhan, whose practice brings together calligraphy, performance and projection. Through the use of generative technologies, Sobhan transforms Arabic and Persian letterforms into evolving digital compositions, exploring how inherited visual languages can be reinterpreted and brought into new dialogue with contemporary tools.
Building on this exploration of lettering across different mediums and cultural contexts, the exhibition also brings together a group of Egyptian artists, establishing an early connection with Qatar’s forthcoming 2027 partnership. Among them is Cairo-based lettering artist and graphic designer Mariem Abutaleb, whose fabric works explore Arabic writing as both language and image. She is joined by fellow Cairo-based artists Nada Hesham, Mina Maurice, Tasneem Hozaien, Tarek Wagih Hamdy and Nora Aly, whose participation further highlights the diversity of contemporary artistic practices engaging with Arabic lettering.
Traces of the Desert Light
Presented by Sanae Collective, Traces of the Desert Light includes Greece-based Josef Gereige, extending the programme’s connections with the countries participating in Years of Culture in 2027. The exhibition explores the relationship between craftsmanship, light and architectural space, considering how illumination changes the way an object’s form and surface are perceived.
Across textiles, sculptural furniture, ceramics and wooden objects, light reveals fibres, grain and texture, while shifting shadows draw attention to edges, openings and the spaces around each work. The presentation invites visitors to slow down and observe the traces of making, connecting contemporary design with craft knowledge passed between generations and the cultural memories held in everyday materials.
Kirstin Mearns, QC+ CEO said: “MIHAD is a gallery built on a clear belief: great art and design deserve a home with a strong philosophy and purpose”. Our ambition is to champion exceptional talent and the creativity that drives it, bringing together artists and designers from Qatar, the region and around the world whose work challenges, inspires and endures. This opening programme celebrates our collaboration with Years of Culture through creative voices and perspectives from across its partner countries, creating meaningful connections through art, design and culinary experiences. We are proud for MIHAD to provide a platform for these exchanges and for the relationships they can continue to build beyond the opening programme.”
Launched in 2012, Years of Culture builds relationships between Qatar and partner countries through cultural, educational and creative exchanges. The presentations at MIHAD, reflect this continuing commitment, connecting the current year’s partnerships with the artistic conversations taking shape ahead of 2027.
