Loading ...A Transcontinental Curator… Wassan Al Khudhairi
By: Ahmad K. Minkara
Al Mahha Art
I drove from Atlanta to Birmingham, Alabama, to see the great collection at The Birmingham Museum of Art and to interview the curator, Wassan Al-Khudhairi. The scenic drive through the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains was more of a lovely promenade. Along with the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Birmingham Museum of Art has one of the richest and most unique collections in the southeast United States.
Wassan, a very poetic Arab name, means the state between being awake and being asleep. Born in Kuwait to parents from Baghdad, Al-Khudhairi immigrated with her family to the U.S. shortly before the First Gulf War. As a Georgia State University undergraduate, she studied Egyptology and made time to work at the High Museum membership department. This soon led to an opportunity to spend a year abroad, at the American University in Cairo, where she continued her studies. While Al-Khudhairi immersed herself in hieroglyphics and the study of ancient Egyptian culture, she discovered the city’s vibrant contemporary art scene—mainly through the Townhouse Gallery.
Prior to 2006, Middle Eastern contemporary art was not en vogue in the West. This predicament prompted Al-Khudhairi to pursue a master’s degree in Islamic Art shortly afterwards.
While studying at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, she also interned at the British Museum’s registrar department for the Asia collection. The time in England helped Al-Khudhairi to build a thorough understanding of Islamic art. After graduating from SOAS, Al-Khudhairi interned for a year at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York City, where she helped in the launching of the Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Her experience at the Brooklyn Museum was eye opening, she said, because it revealed how a museum is related to its immediate environment and taught her how the museum could be an instrumental thread in the fabric of the community—this is the hallmark of the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
A Family Visit Leading to Mathaf…
While visiting her parents in Qatar in 2005, Al-Khudhairi made contact with H.E. Sheikh Hassan bin Mohamed bin Ali Al Thani, a prominent art collector. A year later, Sheikh Hassan donated his private collection to build a modern art museum in Qatar, which consisted of more than 6,000 artworks that offered a rare comprehensive overview of modern Arab art, representing the major trends and sites of production spanning 170 years from the 1840s to the present day. With his major contribution, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art was founded and Al-Khudhairi was appointed the director—one of the youngest museum directors ever.
“I served as the founding director leading up to the opening then was promoted to the Director in 2010 after the museum opened to the public,” says Al-Khudhairi, “I was hired in 2007, became acting-director in 2008, the museum open[ed] in 2010 and I left in 2012.”
Together with her colleague Deena Chalabi, Al-Khudhairi would develop the vision, mission, and strategic plan for Mathaf from the brand identity to the logo.
Al-Khudhairi found an old public school on the Qatar Foundation campus and had French architect Jean Francois Bodin redesign and renovate the building. The use of this school meant that the building would be familiar to Qataris and they would relate to it. The space itself is not remarkable architecturally, meaning that patrons would focus on the actual art, rather than marvel at the building’s design. Mathaf opened in December 2010 featuring three exhibitions:
- Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art. The title was inspired by a poem by acclaimed Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. The exhibition consisted of a modern collection from the Arab world, co-curated by Al-Khudhairi, Dr. Nada Shabout and Deena Chalabi.
- Interventions, curated by Dr. Nada Shabout and featuring one recent work by five living Arab artists: Dia Azzawi; Farid Belkahia; Ahmed Nawar; Ibrahim el-Salahi, and Hassan Sharif.
- Told, Untold, Retold, co-curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath. This latter exhibit featured 23 Arab artists, including Ghada Amer, Akram Zaatari, Lamia Joreige, Wafaa Bilal, and Adel Abidin. Each artist was commissioned to produce a new work of art for the show.
The opening of Mathaf also coincided with the first AMCA conference during Dr. Nada Shabout’s term as president.
Before Mathaf opened to the public, Al-Khudhairi organized an international tour to announce the opening of the museum. It is common for news to travel from any point the Arab world to the West first, before being relayed back to the rest of the region, but it was important for Mathaf to have its opening announced initially in major Arab cities. To accomplish this, Al-Khudhairi took her team to Cairo, Beirut, and Marrakech, where they showed audiences what the Qatari museum would be like, rather than give traditional press conferences. Each event engaged artists, curators, or art practitioners as presenters. London and Paris were included to the tour at the end of the trip as a bonus.
As the museum’s director, Al-Khudhairi concedes that she was so occupied with administrative responsibilities that she didn’t have much time to be a curator. After 2012, Al-Khudhairi left Mathaf and spent a year and a half co-curating a single exhibition, spending the four months leading up to its opening in Gwangju.
From The Middle East to The Far East To Southern East
Gwangju is the sixth largest city in South Korea. The Gwangju Biennale, which was founded in September 1995, is Asia’s first and most prestigious contemporary art biennale. Dedicated to memory of those lost in the bloody 1980 civil uprising against the repression of the Gwangju Democratization Movement, it presents a global perspective on contemporary art. Al-Khudhairi was the only West Asian out of six curators. The rest were women from India, Indonesia, China, Japan, and South Korea, which made for an inter-Asian dialogue between curatorial team. The sub-theme of Al-Khudhairi’s show was revisiting history. She wanted to show how malleable the view of history was by presenting a piece by the Egyptian artist Wael Shawky, who reenacted the events of President’s Sadat’s assassination in 1981. Shawky had children act out the Sadat assassination according to their abstract interpretation.
In May 2014, Al-Khudhairi accepted a position as a curator for modern and contemporary at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama. There, one can currently find work by acclaimed Palestinian artist Emily Jacir and Brazilian artist Beatriz Millhazis, who is known for using her pieces to juxtapose Brazilian cultural imagery with references to western modernist painting. Al-Khudhairi explains that Birmingham is a dynamic city, where contemporary art collectors have a strong presence. This gave her a great opportunity to contribute to the contemporary art landscape, such as in the fall of 2014, when the museum hosted a performance by Slavs and Tatars in conjunction with Art Papers Live, an Atlanta-based but nationally and internationally distributed art magazine. Other notable events include hosting a performance by Derrick Adams and having Mac Arthur Genius award winner Rick Lowe gave a lecture at the museum this spring.
Al-Khudhairi is currently working on a large-scale contemporary art exhibition. While touring the various foyers and galleries in the Birmingham Museum of Art, I was smitten by a few works. I could not take my gaze off Interior of Antwerp Cathedral by Flemish painter Pieter Neefs, Viscountess Portrait of Lady Helen Vincent d’Abernon by the American John Singer Sargent, and Late Afternoon by the American Philip Guston.
Whether it is her international experience, her unique and diverse background, her unquenchable passion for curating, or her fierce intellect, it remains unclear what makes Al-Khudhairi one of the youngest and brightest leaders not only in the emerging contemporary art scene but in the Western world as well.