As part of Qatar – USA Year of Culture 2021, a digital art competition and a workshop for filmmakers is being organised to bring the two cultures together.

Qatar-based artists and enthusiasts will have the opportunity to showcase their creativity in a digital art competition, which forms part of Qatar – USA Year of Culture 2021. Organised by Qatar Museums (QM), this unique activity urges ‘participants to be innovative, flexing their artistic talents while also being creative, fun, vibrant, and exciting’ as it aims to ‘bring the two cultures together’

In a statement, QM said: “We invite you to create a digital work of art that expresses and is inspired by 20th Century American Pop-Art and pop artists, and their vibrant and diverse mainstream culture, while also using Qatari society and culture as a muse. Artists must merge these concepts, creating a cultural exchange between American art and Qatari culture.

Four winners will receive vouchers worth up to QR5,000 for In-Q, an online museum gift shop which has stores at the Museum of Islamic Arts, National Museum of Qatar, and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, and Cass Art, QM’s art supply store. QM noted that artists can submit a maximum of three pieces of work before September 30 and submissions should be culturally appropriate. There are no age restrictions and the size of artwork is flexible, but the resolution must be 300dpi.

Filmmakers and cinephiles can also take part in an online workshop organised by the Doha Film Institute (DFI). Titled Watching the Classics with Richard Pena: The Modernist Impulse, it aims to provide a deeper understanding of film history.

Pena was the programme director of the Film Society of Lincoln Centre and the director of the New York Film Festival from 1988 to 2012. The workshop will comprise three sessions – with the last on September 6. Each focuses on an undisputed world cinema classic, between 5.30pm and 7.30pm (Doha time). Lab fee costs QR250 and Culture Pass members are entitled to a 10% discount. “In the weekly sessions, Professor Pena will present a given film within its aesthetic, economic, technological and social/ political context, detailing each director’s formal techniques while teasing out the implications of these artistic and technical decisions,” DFI said.

The third session – ‘Eclipse (L’eclisse)’/1962/Michelangelo Antonioni/Italy – discusses the third and boldest part of a very loosely conceived trilogy of films about postwar Italian society. DFI noted that this workshop, which will be delivered in English, is open to applicants over 18 years old. ✤

GO: VISIT DOHAFILMINSTITUTE.COM FOR MORE INFORMATION.