Traces of Home: 30 Qatari artists at Mall Galleries, free

Thirty artists from Qatar are bringing their paintings to London this week. Traces of Home, or أثر من الوطن in Arabic, opens in the North Gallery at Mall Galleries on The Mall on Tuesday 20 October and runs until Saturday 24 October, 10am to 5pm each day. Admission is free.

There are 31 works. Most are oil paintings, with acrylics, a charcoal piece, a painting on leather and one made partly in handmade wool. The subjects are the things the artists grew up with: old neighbourhoods and their architecture, horses and camels, falconry, weddings, grandmothers, the sea and the pearl, and Doha’s towers going up behind all of it.

The show was founded, curated and directed by Aljoori Al-Musaifri, a young Qatari artist and art education student who also has a painting in it. She calls it “an independent, artist-led initiative with the ambition of bringing a comprehensive artistic portrait of Qatari culture to an international audience.”

“For our group, it marks a first collective presentation abroad on this scale, a milestone we are proud to share in London,” she says.

What is on the walls

“The exhibition presents 31 artworks exploring Qatar’s heritage, identity and visual memory,” Aljoori says. “Subjects include traditional neighbourhoods, architecture, horses, camels, falconry and scenes of daily life, offering visitors a personal view of the country through the eyes of its artists.”

“Together, they explore the relationship between home, childhood, belonging and cultural traditions, while reflecting the individual experiences of the participating artists.”

Her own canvas, Where Nations Meet, shows a man in a dark suit reaching down to a child in white, their two long shadows crossing on the sand.

Some of the artists have painted London into the story. Shaikha Nasser AlMadfaa’s Home in a Foreign Frame puts shoppers in thobes and abayas on the pavement outside Harrods, with a red double-decker and a black cab going past. In Wassayf Al-Kuwari’s Wherever We Go, a man with a falcon on his arm looks out through an arched window at Big Ben and a red telephone box.

Others stay at home. Sara Jaber Alhajri’s The Legacy of Falconry has a falconer in the desert with his 4x4 parked behind him; Aljazi Nathem Alkhuzaei’s The Pearl has a crowd carrying a giant oyster in front of the Doha skyline; Ayah Saeed Hamad Alathbah’s Grandmother’s Stories is two children sitting on a red rug listening.

Why she started it

“As a young Qatari artist and Art Education student, I established this exhibition to create an opportunity for fellow artists to share their work internationally and introduce audiences to the stories behind our culture,” Aljoori says.

The picture at the top of this page shows a stack of the canvases leaned against a wall, some of them on their sides: the Harrods street scene, the falconer, Shaima Bin Tooq’s Oil Discovery, Arwa Fares’s tiles and Aljoori’s own painting among them.

Every work in the show

These are the 30 works in the catalogue the exhibition sent us, with each artist’s own title, medium and size. Two are listed without a title.

Visiting

• Where: Mall Galleries, North Gallery, The Mall, London SW1Y 5BD
• When: Tuesday 20 to Saturday 24 October 2026, 10am to 5pm
• Price: free
• Closing evening reception: Saturday 24 October, 5.30pm to 8.30pm

The printed invitation gives the run as 20 to 25 October; the organiser gives the public dates as 20 to 24 October, with Saturday’s reception as the close.

For more of Aljoori’s work and updates on the show, follow her on Instagram.

Sponsored feature for Traces of Home.