Art Basel Qatar has announced further highlights of its first-ever iteration, to be held in partnership with Qatar Sports Investment (QSI) and QC+ from 5 to 7 February 2026.
Curated by Wael Shawky, the first edition of Art Basel in Doha will see a total of 87 participating galleries, with 84 artists set to showcase their work. In addition, a Special Projects programme will be unveiled during the fair. Also curated by Shawky, alongside Vincenzo de Bellis, Chief Artistic Officer and Global Director Art Basel Fairs, the programme will take the form of a series of nine site-specific large-scale installations, sculptures and performances. These will be presented across various sites in Msheireb Downtown Doha.
Artists selected for the Special Projects programme include Abraham Cruzvillegas with autoconstrucción, a large-scale iteration of an ongoing project examining shifting identities and attitudes towards life; Bruce Nauman, with Beckett’s Chair Portrait Rotated, a new 3D work on video which will be shown in M7’s theatre; Hassan Khan, who will showcase Little Castles and Other Songs for the first time, a recording of his recent songs performed on a custom-designed digital system; and Khalil Rabah, with Transition, among other things, a new adaptation composed of pieces of domestic, institutional and industrial spaces from projects engaging with the critique of institutions.
Also featuring in the programme will be Nalini Malani, who is set to unveil My Reality is Different, a single-channel version of her nine-channel stop motion video on iPad and which will be projected onto the façade of M7; Nour Jaouda, who will construct a ‘rest house’ out of steel, architectural sketches and textiles as an embodiment of the process of coming into being; Rayyane Tabet will take on the act of taking rest under a palm tree with the immersive installation What Dreams May Come| أيُّ أحلامٍ قَدْ تأتي ; Sumayya Vally imagines an evolving majlis entitled In the Assembly of Lovers, inspired by richly historical spaces across the Muslim world; and Sweat Variant (Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born) will present a durational movement work of three hours, in which four performers will seek to test the boundaries of memory attention.
The projects will constitute the largest body of public artworks to be showcased during any edition of Art Basel, and will respond to the fair’s chosen curatorial theme of Becoming. The programme will provide artists with the opportunity to respond directly to the environment around them and engage with the socio-political realities of the current global context, while also exploring how this impacts the question of identity in the MENASA region, further anchoring this edition of Art Basel to the local context of Qatar.
De Bellis commented: “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.”
