Art Basel Qatar 2026: The Special Projects to Look Out For
With 87 galleries from 31 countries, and 84 artists, more than half from the MENASA region, the inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar positions itself not merely as a commercial fair, but as a deeply curatorial proposition. Under the artistic direction of Wael Shawky, and shaped around the theme Becoming, placing artistic practice in direct dialogue with place and public life.
At the heart of this vision of Art Basel Qatar is the Special Projects programme, nine large-scale, site-specific works unfolding across Msheireb Downtown Doha forming the most extensive public art programme ever staged at an Art Basel fair. These projects move beyond the booth, activating theatres, façades, courtyards, and public spaces, and turning the city itself into an exhibition site.
Abraham Cruzvillegas
Untitled Pending Self Portrait Looking For Pearls On A Phone Call (with some pink and green secrets) (2026)
Working with locally sourced recycled materials, Cruzvillegas creates a suspended sculptural installation that gathers contradiction and fragility into a single form. Political, emotional, and environmental reflections coexist here, proposing transformation through small, collective, almost quiet act, an ethos that resonates strongly with the fair’s theme of Becoming
Bruce Nauman
Beckett’s Chair Portrait Rotated
Projected at monumental scale inside M7’s grand theatre, Nauman’s new 3D video work transforms architecture into an immersive field of perception. Language, repetition, and spatial disorientation, hallmarks of Nauman’s practice, become tools to unsettle how we experience time, body, and interior space .
Hassan Khan
Little Castles and Other Songs
A live musical performance built on a custom digital system, Khan’s project responds to a world marked by instability and emotional unrest. The work blends sound, technology, and live presence, turning music into a register of political and psychological transformation
Khalil Rabah
Transition, among other things
Rabah continues his long-standing institutional critique through an installation composed of displaced domestic, industrial, and institutional fragments. Reassembled into new sculptural architectures, the work reflects on occupation, environmental memory, and the politics embedded in material remnants and spatial control.
Nalini Malani
Ballad of a Woman
Presented as a monumental outdoor projection on the M7 façade, Malani’s hand-drawn stop-motion animation transforms Msheireb’s public realm into a charged visual field. Drawing from histories of migration, gender, and violence, the work confronts viewers with unrelenting imagery that collapses personal memory into collective experience.
Nour Jaouda
A House Between Two Houses
Jaouda constructs an imagined “rest house” using steel walls, layered drawings, and suspended textiles. Neither rural nor urban, fixed nor complete, the skeletal structure becomes a metaphor for emotional geography—memory as something constantly under construction, always in a state of becoming .
Rayyane Tabet
What Dreams May Come | أيُّ أحلامٍ قَدْ تأت
Inspired by the simple act of resting beneath a palm tree, Tabet’s experiential pavilion creates a shared space for dreaming and reflection. Using intersecting circular forms clad in palm fronds, the installation explores dreaming as a suspended state, between past and future, solitude and collectivity, deeply rooted in Gulf cultural landscapes.
Sumayya Vally
Assembly of Lovers
A continuously transforming majlis, Vally’s project draws from historic gathering spaces across the Muslim world. Reconfigured throughout the fair to host conversations and encounters, the installation becomes a living monument to collective presence, asking how architecture shapes, and is shaped by, how we gather.
Sweat Variant (Okwui Okpokwasili & Peter Born)
A three-hour durational movement work performed by four bodies in continuous relation, this project explores endurance, care, and embodied memory. Without a fixed beginning or end, audiences are invited to enter and exit freely, mirroring how inheritance, attention, and transformation unfold over time .
Why This Matters
Together, these Special Projects reposition Art Basel Qatar as more than a fair, it becomes a city-scale exhibition, where art engages directly with public space, regional histories, and lived experience. Through *Becoming*, the inaugural edition offers not spectacle alone, but a sustained reflection on how we inhabit change, individually and collectively .
