Italian artist Quayola’s exhibition, “New Landscape,” will open tomorrow at M7 in Msheireb. The exhibition is a collaboration between the Embassy of Italy in Qatar, Fondazione AGO – Modena Fabbriche Culturali, and the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.
Curated by Claudio Composti, the exhibit explores nature as interpreted by machines. The central works in the exhibition, Storms and Remains: Vallée de Joux, are monumental in scale. They showcase Quayola’s deep dive into the idea of “reimagined landscapes.” Storms presents a triptych featuring crashing waves, allowing viewers to witness the raw power of nature through the lens of data.
According to Quayola, machines capture these waves and generate only data, a list of measurements and positions. These measurements, when processed, recreate the image of the waves. “Hundreds of millions of data points give us enough information to reproduce the scene,” Quayola explains.
This digital reimagining of nature’s chaos blurs the line between human perception and machine interpretation. The Remains: Vallée de Joux series takes the concept even further, focusing on the forest scenery captured by the machine, which lacks the capacity to truly understand nature in a human sense. Instead, it only computes the data it’s fed, reassembling it into a scene based on its programmed parameters.
The process behind the artwork is lengthy. Quayola recalls spending weeks in the Swiss mountains to collect enough data for his project. The “motion information” gathered, rather than the brushstrokes, drives the artwork’s creation.
In a speech during the VIP preview of the exhibition, Paolo Toschi, Italian Ambassador to Qatar, welcomed the opening of New Landscape in Doha. He noted, “This is one of the best examples of Italian creativity, and we are proud to bring it to Doha.” He thanked all involved in making the exhibition a reality and praised the ongoing cultural exchange between Italy and Qatar.
