The latest edition of Art Basel Miami Beach sees exhibitors return with a fresh selection of works, providing a momentary distraction from concerns surrounding the state of the art market.
On the cusp of the inaugural Art Basel Qatar in two months’ time, this year’s edition of the over half-century-old Art Basel Miami Beach has more than 250 exhibitors on view at the city’s Convention Center. Although only a handful of MENA-based galleries are present, there are many artists from the region delivering a noticeable statement.
Art Basel Miami Beach anchors what is without doubt the most ambitious art week in the Americas. Besides the dominant European, American and Latin American presence, the fair also offers a number of Arab voices available for exploration. Among those, Nairy Baghramian is a standout. Her enigmatic sculpture of a sleek garbage bin, entitled Waste Basket (bin for rejected ideas) (2017), is hung on a wall at Marian Goodman Gallery’s booth as an homage to fleeting mental sparks. The Iran-born German artist – who makes bodily sculptures that allude both to architectural restraints and corporal possibilities – has also been announced as the winner of the Established Artist prize at the inaugural Art Basel Awards.
The Thursday night ceremony was hosted by Swizz Beatz and saw Meriem Bennani receive the Boss prize, which is given in addition to eleven blown glass trophies designed by Swiss architect Jacques Herzog of Herzog & de Meuron. The New York-based Moroccan artist’s amusingly esoteric and hyper-visualised work in moving image is the subject of her first exhibition in her home country in Essaouira. Bennani was also nominated in the Emerging Artist category, where the prize went to the Saudi artist Mohammad Alfaraj. Meanwhile, Jameel Arts Centre was nominated in the category dedicated to Institutions, which was handed to Dakar’s RAW Media Company. Besides three categories dedicated to artists, this year marked a new category reserved for storytellers and awarded in its first year to Negar Azimi. The writer and curator is the chief editor of the publishing and curatorial platform Bidoun, which ran as a print outlet from 2004 until its transformation into an online and exhibition-based project in 2013.
Back at the fair, numerous female voices are cutting through the aisles with inviting materials and layered narratives. Ghada Amer at Marianne Boesky Gallery’s booth has a group of applied canvases which radiate with their textured surfaces – punctured with cotton and laden with feminist messages, the energetic works weave together joy and resistance. Hayv Kahraman with Jack Shainman Gallery exhibits the large linen painting, Rain Ritual (2024), on which a quartet of women form a cyclic force through grabbing each others’ hair. Innate to the Iraqi-born artist’s particular visual universe, the subjects appear both alluringly mythical and brutally real, with their disarming expressions and complex flexibilities, while in the work on view a sense of lunar rhythm feels both haunting and freeing.
Fresh from unveiling her permanent 12-metre-wide installation, The Ziggurat Splits the Sky, at the expanded Princeton University Museum, Diana Al-Hadid shows with Olney Gleason a panel of an oozing landscape, conveyed in her signature material alchemy of polymer gypsum, fibreglass, steel, plaster, metal leaf and pigment. Both grand and grotesque, the semi-abstracted work, entitled Mid-October (2025), stands as an exploration of history’s linearity and of humanity’s perpetual urge to progress – and regress.
Following the placement of her monumental sculpture, First Sun, at the southeast entrance of Central Park with Public Art Fund, Monira Al Qadiri continues her US presence with a work at Perrotin (where she also had a solo show recently). Three sculptures from her Spectrum series complete beauty, desire and value with a look at the history of the pearl trade. 3D-printed and coated with car paint, forms inspired by oil drills have iridescent tones and sharply ornate silhouettes, which remove their extractive purposes and present them as jewels.
New York gallery Uffner & Liu’s group presentation includes Arghavan Khosravi’s three-dimensional structurally precise painting, A Conversation (2025), in which two cubic portraits are joined by thin chains. Sheree Hovsepian’s two mixed-media prints, on the other hand, possess architectural rhythms slicing through her subjective approach to lines and gentle materials, such as ceramic and strings. Another group presentation at Alexander Gray Associates includes Untitled (ArabesqueComposition) (2022–23), an abstract painting by Kamrooz Aram, whose non-figurative gestures make bold references to ornamentation and beauty in defiance of Western modernism’s rigid framework for colour and visual exuberance.
Making its Miami Beach debut, Carbon 12 is one of the small number of galleries from the Arab world at the fair and has a solo presentation by Nour Malas in the fair’s Positions sector. Spanning all three walls of the stand is her four-panel painting Another Mother’s Breaking Her is Taking Over (2025), which offers a chaotic non-linear landscape of destruction and loss. Abstracted with explosive hints of representation, the France-born Syrian painter’s grand undertaking walks the viewers on a minefield of collapse and regain. Malas is also represented in Chicago-based Patron Gallery’s booth with a painting entitled Chasing Witches in the Street (2025), in which green and aubergine hues clash and harmonise.
Dastan’s neatly organised group presentation by curator Donna Honarpisheh expands her interest in the subject of miniature painting and its narrative potential with a long list of artists, including Iman Raad, Farah Ossouli, Mamali Shafahi, Reza Aramesh and Bahar Behbahani. The various approaches to the Persian miniature through contemporary and interpretive lenses results in an outlook that is aesthetically minimalist at times and abundant at others. Ossouli’s subtle gouache drawings allude to the timeless fables of impossible love while Behbahani’s grounding mixed-media paintings appear as topographic musings on belonging and remembrance. The sentiment and sales on the fair’s first two days partially swept away the prevalent concern about the state of the art market due to a breadth of social and political factors, and a substantial sum of exhibitors expressed desirable feedback and deal closures. In an ever-transforming sector, it might be a challenge to foresee even under two months when Art Basel’s Qatar leg debuts in the first week of February—so the best is to wait and see.
