Ali Hassan Al-Jaber's calligraphic horse capturing travel and movement at HIA.

Hamad International AirportDoha

Desert Horse

Ali Hassan Al-Jaber's calligraphic horse capturing travel and movement at HIA.

Desert Horse by Ali Hassan Al-Jaber translates calligraphic abstraction into a sculpture of motion at Hamad International Airport. The Qatari artist treats the horse — a symbol of nomadic heritage — as a flowing line rather than a literal animal, aligning with the airport's theme of departure and return.

The work sits among HIA's growing collection of commissions by Gulf and international artists, visible to passengers in transit.

Exhibo editorial

Al-Jaber compresses a cultural symbol into a single gesture. You read it as horse and as script at the same time, which is the point of calligraphic sculpture.

If you are hunting HIA's art, add this to Flying Man, Cosmos and Small Lie for a proper terminal trail.

How to find it

Hamad International Airport terminal. Consult the airport art map for the current position within the departures or arrivals zones.

Similar places

All places

Related stories

A large landscaped roundabout in Doha, Qatar, with a monumental sculpture on its central island and multi-lane traffic circling it against a backdrop of West Bay towers.
Editorial

Why Doha Is Full of Roundabouts

An old circle at a crossroads, sharpened by British road engineering, became the way an Arabian city found its way and remembered itself — and it took the bulldozers to reveal it.

In a city where a landmark was more useful than an address, Doha's roundabouts became its navigation, its landscaping and its national image all at once. Now they're being torn out for signalled junctions — and the affection for them arrived, as one scholar put it, only posthumously.

An Arabian oryx, white with long nearly straight ringed horns and dark facial markings, standing in pale desert sand.
Editorial

The Animal We Drew Everywhere Once It Was Gone

From Neolithic rock to airline tailfin — how the Arabian oryx vanished from the desert, came back from nine animals, and multiplied everywhere as a symbol in the very decades it was gone.

The last wild Arabian oryx was shot in 1972. By then it was already a picture — carved on Bronze Age tombs, mistaken by the ancients for a unicorn, praised by poets as the eyes of the beloved. This is the story of an animal that went extinct in the wild and was brought back from nine survivors, and of the strange gap between the creature and the emblem it became: fast, sharp and ascendant on a nation's tailfin, while the animal itself survives by standing still in the shade.

A massive granite column shaft under a stone arch, seen from below, with the dome springing above it.
Editorial

Seventy Thousand Solomons: The Empire That Performed a Legend

A demon catalogue in the conqueror's library, a sixteenth-century text where kingship is an office held seventy thousand times, and the columns a sultan dragged across three provinces to prove he held it.

Mehmed II kept a Greek catalogue of demons in his library at Topkapı. Seventy years later a sultan named for a prophet was rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem and hauling Roman columns out of Egypt and the Lebanon into a mosque above the Golden Horn. In between, Ottoman writers turned Solomon from a warning into a job — and the empire applied for it in stone.