Malba in Qatar: the heritage under the desert sun

And finally, the most anticipated opening of the year has arrived, but on the other side of the world, in the city of Doha, on the Arabian Peninsula. We're not exaggerating when we say this is Argentina's fourth star . Latinoamericano , Malba's major exhibition in Qatar , features 170 pieces by 109 artists from across the continent, belonging to the museum's collections and the personal estate of Eduardo Costantini .

It opened on Sunday, April 20, and will remain open until July 19 at the National Museum of Doha , the dazzling building designed by French architect Jean Nouvel , a construction of organic forms and so embedded in the city that, once inside, little of this ultra-contemporary city can be seen. Erected in just a few decades, Doha offers a catalogue of the great architectural signatures of the 21st century, from China's I.M. Pei to Rem Koolhaas . The National Museum evokes those whimsical mineral forms known as the "desert rose," with diagonal circular planes.

The opening of Latinoamericano is part of the Qatar-Argentina-Chile Year of Culture 2025 , a milestone in the visionary program of exhibitions and exchanges that began more than 12 years ago, preceding Qatar's bid to host the World Cup.

The week featured a series of events, from the unveiling of murals by artists from the Southern Cone to public dialogues with Hans-Ulrich Obrist and other prominent speakers, to photography exhibitions. All of these events were attended by Sheika Al Mayassa bint Hamad Al Thani , sister of the monarch, Emir Tamim . This woman in her 40s, warm-hearted despite her distance from the sovereign, is a unique female figure in the Islamic world—for years, the most powerful. She has wielded the country's soft power and convinced the hierarchy of this absolute monarchy to allocate part of its unlimited resources to museums and cultural institutions. To achieve this, they require coffers in the form of oil wells, yes, but also a strategic vision for culture and education. Sheika Al Mayassa's encouragement, who must be addressed as "Your Excellency," has been open and in tune with the West, a source of political friction in a traditionalist elite such as this one.

Its Argentine counterpart has been the very personal endeavor of Teresa Bulgheroni , president of the Malba Foundation, who is driving this project to internationalize the prodigious Costantini collection. There are surely more dreams on her radar.

Qatar has been investing resources in cultural institutions for over a decade, created ex nihilo or through economic persuasion. Mexico and Brazil already had their solo exhibitions in Doha, and this time it's Malba's turn, which, without nationalist criteria and with an attractive selection , composed a story about aesthetic synchronicities and vernacular imagery in a vast and contrastingly integrated Latin America. The challenge was to narrate and translate to another culture the distance that runs from Pedro Figari to Joaquín Torres García , but also from them to our symbolist, Xul Solar , and to Remedios Varo , born in Spain and emigrated to Mexico, to mention just a few.

Meanwhile, in the vast courtyard of the Museum, one of the favorite places for families in Doha and surrounded by the spectacular plans of the architect Nouvel, the 16 striped inflatables that make up the Sculpture of Dreams by Marta Minujin explode, the installation that until last month was at the Rome Convention Center, and that previously passed through the Liberty Palace (formerly CCK) and Times Square in New York.

The artist was unable to attend because she was traveling in the U.S. at the time. In the galleries we found Minujín again, sitting opposite Andy Warhol , paying for The External Debt with corn. In this monochromatic city, where eclectic skyscrapers coexist with the picturesque wooden boats in the bay—the only legacy of the pearl divers who brought life to these shores at the beginning of the 20th century—Minujín is a welcome note of disobedience that begins with the retina.

Curated by Issa Al Shirawi , head of International Exhibitions at Qatar Museums, and María Amalia García , chief curator at Malba, Latinoamericano organizes its grand panoramic narrative around distinct cores : the vital affiliation of artists to European modernism, the vertiginous urbanization in the first half of the last century and the militant politicization of art under the second avant-garde in the 1960s, and ten years later, the political tragedy suffered by a good part of the continent.

The exhibition includes iconic works from Malba, which surely made collector Eduardo Costantini suffer, since they are the heart of his collection. Among them, Self-Portrait with Monkey and Parrot (1942) by Frida Kahlo , and Dance in Tehuantepec (1928) by Diego Rivera , two of the collector's record-breaking purchases. Also included is Antonio Berni 's fresco (which left the country for the first time) and his Sleeping Juanito ; other pieces include The Song of the People by Emilio Pettoruti , Puzzle by Jorge de la Vega , and a work by the surrealist Varo.

There are paintings, photographs and sculptures from Chile, Uruguay, Colombia, Venezuela, Paraguay and Cuba (as well as Wifredo Lam , two pieces by the extraordinary engraver Belkis Ayón , never exhibited at Malba, on Afro-Caribbean religious practices). Belkis, as Cubans call her, had a tragic life by virtue of her political and sexual dissidence; she merited a major retrospective at the Reina Sofía three years ago.

The Buenos Aires-based heritage has been joined by artists such as Alice Rahon and the German-Mexican sculptor Mathias Goeritz , both of whom belong to the Museum of Modern Art in Doha : their two pieces bear witness to the artist's dialogue with Islamic tradition, following his trips to Jordan and the ruins of Petra.

The National Museum is free for residents and offers an attractive ticket price for tourists; this makes the audience challenging. During the tour shared by both curators, they explained that they have sought to identify the various modern movements—with their speeds and adaptations—in this vast artistic territory and in the heat of different national processes. Among the most recent Argentine pieces exhibited in Doha are a black and white collage by Guillermo Kuitca and a quilted sculpture by Favio Kacero .

Historical photography of the 20th century is represented by Grete Stern , with her series of surrealist montages for the magazine Idilio, the Buenos Aires classics of Horacio Coppola and the urban abstraction of the Brazilian Geraldo de Barros .

Not so far apart in the exhibition, but with contrasting meanings, stand out the beautiful Constellations , by Gyula Kosice , acquired in 2024, at the time of his great exhibition The Hydrospatial City, and the Disappeared Quipu, by the Chilean Cecilia Vicuña , which won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale.

We wonder if Doha would have also been the happy host of Tripa de quipu , an installation from the same series, in its blood-colored version. The allegory of the menstrual quipu would have taken on a confrontational tone in Qatar; it was never at stake, as it doesn't belong in the Malba collection.

Curator María Amalia García emphasized in her tour that Frida adopted the attire and headdresses after a trip abroad, as a way of embracing her Mexican identity. Along with the self-portrait, one of her huipiles and a dozen personal photos, alongside figures of European surrealism, such as André Breton , and in her later years, those lacerating photos of the artist bedridden and painting. It's likely that Kahlo, now one of the world's most popular artists, was the great lure that brought her to Doha. However, the exhibition gracefully sidesteps the easy temptation to rely on commonplaces, Latin American folklore, and the desire for "Westernism" that drives many of Qatar's investments.

The political uprising of the 1970s and pop's radical critique of the "consumer society"—which in Qatar can reach obscene heights of spending and waste—are present in works by Víctor Grippo and Cildo Meireles . Latin American women push some thematic and political boundaries in a country where women experience two parallel processes: many wear the niqab and are busy raising their children, but just as many have not missed the opportunity to acquire an excellent education abroad. Today, women hold a few key positions in the country's cultural service.

The non-negotiable barrier here remains the female body, imbued with the virtues of modesty and chastity, which are often presented as two opposites. At the National Museum, several female artists take center stage, albeit in their more "modest" versions. There are three works by Lygia Clark , one of them alongside ETA, and a work with a possible ecological interpretation by Liliana Maresca , whose nudes are, of course, not shown.

The religious repression of women does not imply, however, that the Islamic world cannot teach us aspects of its perspective, which sanctifies the female body by emphasizing its mystery and maintains the veil over pornography, for them both sinful and grotesque.