How one artist used 4 shapes to inspire infinite conversations

A circle is one of the simplest shapes in art. But its single curved line, with no beginning or end, is also an easy symbol for “infinity,” a concept so complex that even mathematicians can’t agree on its definition. And when reinforced with a few straight lines, circles become a source of infinitely rich patterns.

For Qatari artist Maryam Al-Suwaidi, the circle characterizes her belief that everything is connected. Sometimes that connectedness is conceptual, slyly circumscribed into the structure of her geometric patterns. Other times, the connections are literal—like the brand pattern she designed for Doha Debates, which builds on a centuries-old tradition of Islamic geometric art with layers of interconnected circles and polygons.

In 2023, Doha Debates invited Maryam to submit a proposal for a new brand pattern that would represent Qatari identity, but also resonate with a global audience. She says this directive “created a contradiction in my mind,” one that required her to “pick the right approach in order to solve this equation.”

You might expect that approach to start with brand-related aesthetics. But Maryam is, at heart, a conceptual artist, so she began by researching social behaviors. That meant thinking about how people form identities—how we define ourselves, what ideologies we ascribe to, and how those elements move from one generation to the next.

She found herself returning to local Qatari identity, specifically to geometric patterns, which tap into vast ideological traditions through simple shapes that anybody on Earth can recognize. While “every society, every civilization, has its own way of representing themselves using the same geometrical patterns,” she says, “we know that [those] patterns have a certain representation” in Islamic art. Namely, they speak to “unity, the beauty of Islam, the different aspects of Islam.”

Circles and lines form the bedrock of Islamic geometric art, appearing in patterns adorning mosques as early as the 9th century. Since at least the 13th century, only four basic shapes—created with a compass and a ruler—make up even the most complex patterns: circles, squares, stars (which are really just squares and triangles inside of circles) and multi-sided polygons.

These building blocks, these four shapes, are deeply rooted in Islamic and Middle Eastern history, particularly in the Islamic Golden Age (roughly the 9th – 13th centuries). Astronomers, scientists and mathematicians translated and built upon theories from Greek, Persian, Egyptian and many other philosophies, expanding the knowledge and use of geometry. Take a casual walk through Doha now, and you’ll see the same four shapes forming countless distinct patterns on gates, minarets and courtyard tiles. It’s an ancient story whose chapters are still being written, in a language that anybody in the world can understand.

Maryam’s task was daunting: to design a brand pattern that fit into that story. It needed to lay a universal groundwork that anybody, regardless of cultural background, could build on—whether a debate audience watching the pattern tessellate across a big screen or a graphic designer incorporating it into a new project. Four shapes; infinite possibilities. But Maryam relished in the assignment’s open-ended potential. It was a challenge, she says—not a struggle.

Her original proposal, aptly titled “Principles,” was anchored in the overlapping core values of Islamic geometry and the Majlis, a traditional meeting ground to discuss personal and community issues. The model for Doha Debates’ flagship debates, the Majlis fosters open-mindedness and respect and prioritizes finding common ground among disparate viewpoints. Maryam’s role, as she saw it, was to visually encourage and nurture that open-mindedness. She likens it to cloud-watching. You can stare at the sky with a hundred other people and find a hundred different shapes or animals or faces.

Here’s how Maryam describes the social principles and conceptual guidelines that formed the foundation of her design process: “There are things that we consider taboo. [And then] there are things that we consider [allowable] to act upon. These [form] the basic lines—for example, politeness, communication, ethics, tact.” At first, it’s hard to see how that translates into a tangible piece of art. But Maryam further explains that those “principles, or the guidelines, that the Islamic pattern follows—[they’re like] the same guidelines that everyone follows” to create a civil society. That is, just as we have to agree on the building blocks of a society for it to be productive, we have to agree on the basic principles of pattern-making before picking up a compass and a ruler.

Those fundamental principles, of both art and humankind, are universal. Even with thousands of cultural differences, people worldwide share an understanding of what a circle is, just as we share a general understanding of kindness. But when we layer and combine simple shapes—just as when a society expands and progresses—the resulting patterns are complex and open to individual interpretation. When Maryam creates an intricate geometric design, it “becomes a conversation starter where [people] can use their imagination to express what they see to the people next to them.”

Maryam wants all of her art to trigger emotions and start conversations. From patterns to sculptures, her works are ultimately about trying to understand and communicate with people. Around Qatar, she’s known for her sculptures of babies, which she makes by filling a mold with white cement, often covering the resulting concrete newborn with a highly pigmented black paint. Her two-dimensional work includes drawings of faceless figures that melt into starlight, conjoined fetal skeletons, and her own face, her eyes obscured by a polychrome smear of digital paint.

Although visually disparate, her art is able to inhabit so many genres and moods because conceptually, it originates from the same interest in social behavior, from the individual to the civilization. Just as her design for Doha Debates builds on universal shapes, she says, her ideas always build upon universal tenets: “There is no such thing as an original idea. [Ideas] have to be inspired by something. In order for you—as an individual, or a society, or a community—to evolve, we need to go back to the standards and the principles that we built our grounds on.”

Doha Debates debuted Maryam’s design in 2023 at a live event in Doha. As the lights dimmed, an introduction played on the large screens that curved around the back of the stage, set against her animated pattern. Digital chiaroscuro filled in obvious shapes—circles, squares—and less obvious ones, like half-moons and curved triangles.

As the shading danced across the pattern, still more shapes appeared: flower petals, pillowy diamonds, overlapping triangles that looked like mountains.

It was, as Maryam said, like watching clouds: Although we may have seen something different in the images appearing before us, we were all standing on the same ground.