Doha

Miriam Ewers

During 2011-2012, I joined Virginia Commonwealth University’s Art and Design School in Qatar, a small country diplomatically and culturally important in bridging eastern and western cultures. There, my daily interactions with students naturally stimulated many questions of how a visual culture can lay the groundwork for better understanding between people of different nationalities. If asked to be mediators or interpreters or agents of culture in our globalized context, what would these young artists seek to convey? In turn, what narratives could I draw forth to contribute to a fuller understanding of those living and working in Qatar? I decided to pursue answers to my conundrum in conjunction with my students.

Audio recording five: the last recording touches upon Qatar’s extraordinary diversity and the country’s flourishing educational opportunities. Among the students, who are Euro-Arabic, North African and Arabic, themes emerge about the educational opportunities of Qatar. National identity, cultural complexity, and humor are displayed in the stories of how these students landed in and traveled out from Qatar.

It is said that in Qatar poets, scholars and travelers would gather under the shade of the Sidra tree to exchange knowledge and opinions. This is why the Sidra tree is the image and the symbol of the Qatar foundation, which implemented the Education City where I conducted this research. Coincidentally, paralleling the Sidra tree metaphor, I employed a tree, albeit an acacia tree from Virginia Commonwealth University Qatar’s Art and Design school courtyard, as a metaphor for an educational context. In the accompanying photograph, representing the audio interviews that I conducted with my students. I added a computer-aided design, a grid of globes, a kind of virtual fruit situated below the canopy of the tree, as a symbol of new worlds made possible by the context and imagined by the students. The tree and the digital overlay combine traditional and contemporary aesthetic sensibilities evident in my students’ last audio recording: a connection with traditional Arab culture in all its complexity and a future oriented and global perspective that envelops those living and working in Qatar’s Education City.

Reflecting on the fifth audio recording, above all, I wished to create an image that would convey a spirit of the young women I worked with in Qatar’s Art and Design school; a spirit of empowerment where young women, united by common interests in art and design are supported by a unique and dynamic educational setting. This account of the Prosthesis project reflects the challenges I presented to a few young women in a very specific educational context. I felt very fortunate to have been able to conduct this Prosthesis project in, what was for me, a new cultural context and to experience the students’ thoughtful responses or translations of the prosthetic concept. In particular, it gave me a more nuanced perspective on the delineation of public/private space, as it relates to the body, in Qatar.

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