Qatar Museums (QM) announced the launch of the Lusail Museum Conversations, an ongoing series of public lectures and events. The inaugural season, titled The Late Ottoman World: At the Roots of the Modern Middle East, runs from January to April and will take place at Georgetown University in Qatar. Across five in-depth talks, the series examines questions of authority, artistic expression, reform, and belonging during the 19th century, revealing the foundations of many dynamics that continue to shape the region today. This is the first of a longer cycle of thematic seasons.Designed as a platform for dialogue, scholarship, and cultural exchange, the programme invites audiences to explore, with leading speakers, the cities, stories, and figures of the 19th-century Middle East and beyond. Through conversations led by internationally recognised historians and cultural figures who are also acclaimed storytellers, audiences will learn unexpected stories about late Ottoman culture and the roots of the modern Middle East, discovering how people negotiated the challenges and appeal of European modernity in a world rooted in its own history.The inaugural season brings together five lectures and a film screening, each delving into key aspects of the late Ottoman world. From exploring the intersections of art, authority, and reform, to questions of identity and cultural exchange, the talks examine how pivotal figures and events shaped the cultural and artistic landscapes of the 19th-century Middle East.Audiences will gain insight into palace culture, diplomacy, the experiences of imperial elites, the contributions of women artists, and the legacies of memory and migration in the region. Season One traces art, power, and identity across the late Ottoman world and its peripheries. It opens on January 13 with Edhem Eldem’s Princes, Patrons, and Painters, which examines how the last Ottoman caliph, Abdülmecid (1868–1944), used painting to project modernity and responsibility after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, revealing the paradoxes of imperial modernisation.On January 27, Ridha Moumni’s At the Empire’s Edge explores 19th-century Tunis, showing how rulers reshaped political imagery, ceremony, and architecture, beginning with the Bey’s 1846 visit to Paris, to position the country between Ottoman reform, Mediterranean exchange, and emerging statehood.The third talk, on February 16, features Mostafa Minawi’s Arab-Ottoman Imperialists of Istanbul, which draws on archival research and his book 'Losing Istanbul' (2022) to reconsider nationalism through the lives of Arab imperial elites navigating loyalty and belonging at the empire’s end.On April 1, Gizem Tongo’s painting 'Like a Man' centres on the painter Mihri, examining women artists’ challenges to Orientalism and institutional hierarchies.The season concludes on April 14 with a screening of Philippe Aractingi’s Héritages (2014), followed by a public conversation with the director, hosted by Alain Fouad George of the Lusail Institute.
Tuesday, May 19, 2026
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