Art Basel portfolio continues to expand as the renowned Art Fair has made some exciting announcements in 2025 with the debuting of Art Basel Paris and for 2026, Art Basel will take their illustrious audience and experience to beautiful Qatar.
In partnership with Qatar Sports Investment (QSI) andQC+, this upcoming February, 84 artists and 87 galleries will showcase special artworks alongside special programming that will include a wide-ranging series of nine large-scale, site-specific sculptures, installations, and performances. Steeped in the heart of Msheireb Downtown Doha, art will unfold across several cultural venues and public spaces. The entire art fair has been curated by Art Basel Qatar Artistic Director Wael Shawky in close collaboration with Vincenzo de Bellis, Chief Artistic Officer & Global Director Art Basel Fair. The artistic tandem has commissioned galleries and artists to participate in the fair’s theme Becoming, and together form the most extensive group of public works ever realized for an Art Basel show.
Themed ‘Becoming’, the fair presents a sector dubbed Special Projects hidden in the Galleries sector, which showcases artists focused on the transformation in material and conceptual terms — examining metamorphosis, transition, upheaval, and the thresholds in between. The Special Projects portion engages directly with the storytelling of current environmental, economic, and social shifts that are taking place in the world today. The immersive segment is grounded in urgent regional and global realities, allowing visitors to enjoy a narrative rich journey that features monumental architectural and mixed-media interventions.
Debuting for the first time ever, Art Basel Qatar opens it’s doors for public viewing February 5-7th 2026, across Msheireb Downtown Doha venues M7 and Doha Design District, as well as other locations and venues in the area. The fair features galleries from 31 countries and territories, including 16 making their Art Basel debut. Showcasing work by 84 international artists, with more than half hailing from across the region, this edition firmly positions Art Basel Qatar as the region’s anchor fair, creating a powerful conduit between the MENASA region and the Art Basel network worldwide.
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We are thrilled to announce the highlights of the inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar, which features an exciting series of Special Projects unfolding across Msheireb and responding to the theme Becoming. Together with the main Galleries sector of the show, these works present a narrative of transformation that offers audiences the chance to experience the region’s widest range of artistic practices. The first edition of Art Basel Qatar will be truly remarkable, an opportunity for visitors to encounter firsthand the richness of artistic expression in the MENASA region.”
Vincenzo de Bellis, Chief Artistic Officer & Global Director Art Basel Fairs, stated
“Working with this extraordinary group of galleries and artists for the first edition of Art Basel Qatar is both a privilege and a milestone. Each presentation brings a practice that is deeply rooted in the cultural fabric of the Gulf and its extended geographies, while also pushing conversations forward in bold and unexpected ways. Together, they activate Msheireb with fresh perspectives and new encounters that reshape how audiences engage with place. We can’t wait for visitors to experience the exceptional creativity unfolding in Qatar.”
Wael Shawky, Artistic Director, said:
Special Projects
Marking a defining moment for the launch of Art Basel Qatar, the Special Projects program, offers a remarkable group of acclaimed voices from across the region the chance to showcase outstanding works. Nine selected pieces craft the Special Projects program and features artists such as Abraham Cruzvillegas; Bruce Nauman; Hasan Khan; Khalil Rabah; Nalini Malani; Nour Jaouda; Rayyane Tabet; Sumayya Vally; and Sweat Variant (Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born). Each artist adds to the depth of the fair and brings works that directly speak to the theme of Becoming. With full intention to transform the inaugural edition into a landmark experience, the series features film and moving image, sculpture, performance, and architecture.
Abraham Cruzvillegas
Abraham Cruzvillegas (b. 1968, Mexico City) presents one of his most ambitious large-scale iterations of his long-term work titled autoconstrucción. Cruzvillegas’ interpretation of the word, meaning ‘self-construction’, refers to how scarcity breeds ingenuity, and how a philosophy of life can make something out of nothing, that is also a metaphor for identity and how we are constantly transforming ourselves.
Bruce Nauman
Bruce Nauman (b. 1941, Fort Wayne, Indiana) is one of the most influential and provocative artists of the past half-century. Working across video, sculpture, performance, neon, installation, and sound, Nauman has consistently pushed the boundaries of artistic practice, exploring themes of perception, language, the body, and the psychology of space. For Art Basel Qatar, Nauman will present a new 3D video work Beckett’s Chair Portrait Rotated that will be projected at a massive scale, transforming the vast interior of M7’s grand theatre into an enveloping field of light and motion.
Hassan Khan
Hassan Khan (b. 1975, lives and works in Berlin and Cairo) will premiere Little Castles and Other Songs, a live suite of his recent original songs performed on a customized digital system developed for this purpose by computer music designer and composer Olivier Pasquet. Written during a period of global turbulence, the project channels the material conditions and emotional register of a trembling, shifting world.
Khalil Rabah
Khalil Rabah (b. 1961, Jerusalem) presents an iterative work titled Transition, among other things. The large-scale installation continues his long-standing engagement with institutional critique through an installation composed of reconfigured fragments drawn from domestic, institutional, and industrial contexts. By indexing and recomposing these displaced objects into sculptural architectures, the project interrogates the politics of space, environmental memory, and the shifting value of material remnants under occupation.
Nalini Malani
Nalini Malani (b. 1946, lives and works in Mumbai), who is known for creating work influenced by her experience of migration in the aftermath of the partition of India, presents a monumental single channel iteration of her nine-channel iPad stop motion video My Reality is Different, as a large scale outdoor projection on the M7 facade, transforming the heart of Msheireb with immersive, unrelenting imagery.
Nour Jaouda
Nour Jaouda’s (b. 1997, Tripoli, Libya) project constructs an imagined “rest house” structure rendered through intersecting steel walls, layered architectural drawings, and suspended textile fragments, forming a space shaped by emotional subjectivity, memory, and imagination rather than fixed geography. The installation embodies a process of continual becoming; its skeletal, scaffold-like form houses dyed textile glimpses of a forgotten landscape, dissolving boundaries between rural and urban, past and future, idea and material realization.
Rayyane Tabet
Rayyane Tabet’s (b.1983, Beirut, Lebanon) What Dreams May Come | أيُّ أحلامٍ قَدْ تأتي is an experiential pavilion that explores “Becoming” through the suspended, transformative space of dreaming, drawing from the humble gesture of resting beneath a palm tree. Formed by two intersecting circular structures clad in natural and artificial palm fronds, the immersive installation creates a shared sanctuary that reflects the Gulf’s shifting cultural landscapes and invites visitors into a space of introspection and communal presence.
Sumayya Vally
Sumayya Vally (b. 1990, South Africa) presents In the Assembly of Lovers, a continuously transforming majlis that draws from historic public spaces across the Muslim world, from the Great Mosque of Córdoba and the Church of the Nativity to Gaza’s Omari Grand Mosque and Beirut’s Martyr’s Square, to reimagine how collective presence gives shape to architecture. Taking its title from a line attributed to the Iraqi mystic Rabia al Adawiyya, which calls on us to build again through being together, the installation shifts configuration throughout the fair to host gatherings and conversations, becoming a living monument to how we once gathered and how we might gather again.
Sweat Variant (Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born)
Sweat Variant (Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born) describes the collaborative practice of Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born. Their project is a three-hour durational movement work in which four performers test the limits of attention and relational memory as they hold, bear, and sustain one another within a shifting visual and sonic landscape. Continuing the duo’s exploration of embodied inheritance, the piece unfolds without a fixed end, inviting audiences to enter and exit freely.
Partnerships
A notable part of each Art Basel are the significant partnerships that help make the fair come to life. Art Basel Qatar has some pretty renowned partners for the debut of the fair featuring the Leading Partner Visit Qatar. Visit Qatar is the main marketing and promotional arm of Qatar Tourism, dedicated to promoting and expanding tourism in Qatar by cultivating its rich culture, developing thrilling attractions, enhancing Qatar’s calendar, becoming the leading MICE destination in the region, and diversifying events and luxury experiences. As a leading partner for the fair, Visit Qatar will craft a series of experiences, both bespoke and cultural, that reinforces the importance of art, culture, and international exchange in Qatar.
A Premium Partner for the fair is Qatar Airways. Named World’s Best Airline a record ninth time at the 2025 Skytrax World Airline Awards, Qatar Airways will leverage it’s vast network of resources from over 170 destinations to connect people to new places and many different cultures.
The fair has a short list of Associated Partners featuring Audemars Piguet and BMW. Both parties are providing exclusive services and experiences. BMW for instance will be providing a dedicated VIP Car Service for holders of the Art Basel Qatar First Choice card.
For the fairs Official Partners, this is supported by Media City Qatar and Zegna, while the Official Hotel Partner is Rosewood Doha. UBS returns as Art Basel’s Global Lead Partner and maintains the presence it has offered over the years.
Enjoy A Closer Look Art Basel Qatar Galleries Below!
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