Doha, Qatar: Qatar Museums has 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 2026 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 nineteenth 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 nineteenth-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 Eastern, 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 nineteenth-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.
In the Edhem Eldem lecture, the first talk to be held on January 23, Eldem explores the paintings of the last Ottoman caliph, Abdülmecid (1868-1944), examining how he used his own art to project a self-image of modernity and responsibility following the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. The second talk on January 27, shows how Tunisia’s rulers reshaped political imagery and ceremonial language in the nineteenth century to assert new dynamics of reform and transformation.
On February 16, Mostafa Minawi will bring to life the experiences of Arab members of the Ottoman imperial elite living and working in Istanbul at the turn of the twentieth century in the lecture titled, “Arab-Ottoman Imperialists of Istanbul at the Fall of a Multicultural Empire”.
The fourth talk titled, Painting “Like a Man”: Orientalism and Women Artists in the Late Ottoman Empire” will be delivered by Gizem Tongo on April 1. This lecture centres on the pioneering late Ottoman painter Mihri, situating her career within broader debates on Orientalism and artistic agency. The season concludes with a screening of Héritages (2014) on April 14.
The film offers reflections on exile, memory, and transmission across generations in the Levant, through personal archives and family history. It will be followed by a conversation with award-winning director Philippe Aractingi, hosted by Alain Fouad George, Director of Lusail Institute.
