Doha, Qatar: Years of Culture, Qatar’s long-term cultural exchange initiative, has marked a successful summer of international programming, with major exhibitions presented across Mexico, Chile and China bringing Qatar’s creative partnerships to audiences around the world.
Spanning three continents, the programme reflects the growing international reach of Years of Culture and its commitment to building long-term relationships. From football and the shared memory of the FIFA World Cup in Mexico City, to contemporary film and video art in Santiago and Qatar’s nomadic heritage in Beijing, each project creates a different entry point for audiences to discover Qatar while opening new spaces for dialogue between cultures.
“Years of Culture was created around a simple truth: that meaningful relationships are built over time through shared understanding. This summer demonstrates what that looks like in practice. In Mexico, we are creating new connections through our current Year of Culture; in Chile, relationships established last year continue to grow; and in China, a project first developed through an earlier Year of Culture has found a new audience. These programmes create opportunities for people to understand one another through culture,” said Mohammed Jassim Al Kuwari, Years of Culture Advisor on Latin America.
Mexico City: Football Creates a Shared Language
Few places offered a more natural meeting point between Qatar and Mexico this summer than football.
Four years after Qatar became the first Arab country to host the FIFA World Cup, Mexico welcomed the tournament as a co-host. Against that backdrop, two exhibitions in Mexico City used the game to explore how sporting moments can tell larger stories about culture, identity and the connections between people.
The 3-2-1 Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum and Museo Jumex presented Objects of Glory: Iconic Moments in the History of Football, tracing more than a century of the sport through the objects left behind by some of its most memorable moments and objects. Among them are pieces associated with figures including Pelé and Diego Maradona.
Across the city, at the Centro de Cultura Digital, Qatar 2022 Legacy: Journeys to Greatness turned the lens toward Qatar’s own World Cup. Archival material, photography, multimedia installations, personal accounts and tournament objects revisited the 2022 competition as a moment when millions of people encountered Qatar and the wider Arab world.
Santiago: After the Year Ends
In Chile, the summer offered a different measure of cultural exchange: what remains after an official partner year has ended. Relationships established during the Qatar Argentina and Chile 2025 Year of Culture continued to evolve, building on connections forged through shared histories of migration, storytelling and film.
At Centro Cultural La Moneda in Santiago, Your Ghosts Are Mine: Expanded Cinemas, Amplified Voices opened in August for its first presentation in Latin America. Bringing together film and video works by artists and filmmakers from the Arab world, Africa and Southeast Asia, the exhibition explores questions of memory, displacement, identity and belonging across cultures and geographies.
Drawn from the collections of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art and the future Art Mill Museum, with contributions from the Doha Film Institute, the exhibition also makes a broader argument: that film and video belong within the history of contemporary art, and that our understanding of that history becomes richer when it encompasses voices and perspectives too often left at its margins.
For Years of Culture, however, the significance of Santiago extends beyond the exhibition itself. “Its arrival in Santiago demonstrates an important principle behind Years of Culture: the end of a partner year does not mean the end of the relationship,” Al Kuwari said.
That principle has become increasingly central to the initiative. Cultural exchange is not measured only by what happens during a designated year, but by what those encounters make possible afterwards.
Beijing: A Years of Culture Legacy Continues Its Journey
Thousands of kilometres away, another exhibition has taken an even longer route.
At the National Museum of China in Beijing, the National Museum of Qatar’s On the Move: Reframing Nomadic Pastoralism in Qatar introduces visitors to the knowledge, traditions and rhythms of Qatar’s nomadic and semi-nomadic past.
The exhibition examines life in Qatar from the 18th century until the discovery of oil, a period in which movement was a way of understanding and surviving the landscape. Objects, photographs, films and oral histories explore the skills and traditions that grew from that environment: the construction of tents, Sadu weaving, relationships with animals and the knowledge needed to navigate and live within the desert.
On the Move has itself become an exhibition rooted in movement. It was first developed as part of the Qatar-MENASA 2022 Year of Culture and presented at the National Museum of Qatar during the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022. Two years later, it travelled to the National Museum of Mongolia. This summer, it arrived in Beijing through a collaboration between the National Museum of Qatar and the National Museum of China.
Culture Without Borders
Since its launch in 2012, Years of Culture has worked across exhibitions, heritage, design, photography, film, sport, education and community programmes. Its annual partnerships provide a framework, but increasingly its longer story can be found in what happens after those years end.
