Visitors and residents in Qatar will have opportunity to visit one of Qatar Museums’ (QM) most popular exhibitions by internationally acclaimed Iraqi artist Dia al-Azzawi before it concludes on April 16.
Presented by QM under the leadership of its chairperson HE Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the exhibition, titled ‘I am the cry, who will give voice to me? Dia al-Azzawi: A Retrospective (from 1963 until tomorrow),’ is on at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art and the QM Gallery Al Riwaq. It covers 9,000 sq m and includes more than 500 works. 
“It was the largest ever solo exhibition by an artist from the region. Working with the artist allowed the museum staff and our audiences to connect the regional history and the universal human tragedy addressed in his work,” Mathaf director Abdellah Karroum said in a statement.
“This show is a huge contribution to promoting multiple modernities as part of Mathaf’s vision,” Karroum noted. “Al-Azzawi is also a major artist in our collection, and this project comes at a good moment as we prepare for an original traveling exhibition by the artist.”
The exhibition which reflects the long and distinguished career of al-Azzawi has been curated by Catherine David, deputy director at Centre Pompidou in Paris. It examines the artist’s career, starting as an art student in Iraq in the 1960s. 
Works spanning 50 years across a range of media are featured, including painting, sculpture, drawing, print and artist books, incorporating original and limited editions of artworks on view for the very first time. 
The retrospective is organised into two parts, with each one tracing a trajectory of the artist’s practice. One route charts the emergence of a relationship between image and text in al-Azzawi’s work, and its evolution as a solution to an artistic problem of representation. 
The other follows the artist’s engagement with the key moments in the political history of Iraq and the Arab world, particularly Palestine. 
Both routes derive from an encounter with the poet Muzaffar al-Nawwab in 1968.
Saleh Al Hamad Al Mana Company is the official sponsor of the exhibition.