Founded in 2020, Mathqaf (مَثقَف) is a space and source for art and culture from West Asia and North Africa (WANA). As a research-based platform and a curatorial collective, we publish, curate, collaborate and champion art through documentation of artists’ lives and institutional histories, articles and interviews with curators, collectors, and institutions hailing from all over the region and its diasporas.

At Mathqaf (مَثقَف), we are dedicated to present the richness of the region to local and global audiences. Our mission is to offer a constellation of biographies, archives, documents, and histories of institutions. Thereby becoming a source for cultural institutions and modern and contemporary art from West Asia and North Africa.

Wadha Al-Aqeedi is the co-founder of Mathqaf, curator and art historian, based between Doha and Paris. From 2016 until 2020, she worked at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha as an Assistant Curator. Presently, she is a PhD candidate at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her research interests include performance and media art, cultural history and policy of the Gulf region. In her doctoral research, she investigates how performance art has emerged as an artistic language that carries out discourses that relate to society and contemporary issues, from and within the Arab world.