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Today, Art Basel Qatar unveils new details of the artworks and programming that will define the inaugural edition of the fair in February 2026, presented in partnership with Qatar Sports Investment (QSI) and QC+. Alongside its core presentation of 84 artists and 87 galleries, Art Basel Qatar will showcase a unique Special Projects program — a wide-ranging series of nine large-scale, site-specific sculptures, installations, and performances unfolding across key cultural venues and public spaces in Msheireb Downtown Doha. Curated by Art Basel Qatar Artistic Director Wael Shawky in close collaboration with Vincenzo de Bellis, Chief Artistic Officer & Global Director Art Basel Fairs, these landmark projects respond to the fair’s central theme, Becoming, and together form the most extensive group of public works ever realized for an Art Basel show. In conversation with the artworks in the Galleries sector, the Special Projects deepen the fair’s exploration of Becoming. Across both sectors, artists consider transformation in material and conceptual terms — examining metamorphosis, transition, upheaval, and the thresholds in between. Works presented through the Special Projects engage directly with the seismic environmental, economic, and social shifts shaping our world, grounding the program in urgent regional and global realities. Visitors can expect an immersive, narrative-rich journey in which each work contributes to a wider reflection on transformation and identity across the MENASA region. Featuring monumental architectural and mixed-media interventions, the Special Projects program underscores Art Basel’s commitment to staging fairs that are locally grounded and globally resonant, developed in close collaboration with host cities and their artistic ecosystems. Further details of the Special Projects program are outlined below. Vincenzo de Bellis, Chief Artistic Officer and Global Director Art Basel Fairs, said: '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.' Wael Shawky, Artistic Director, said: '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.” The fair brings together 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. Art Basel Qatar - with Visit Qatar as the fair’s Lead Partner - will be held from 5-7 February 2026 (with Preview Days from 3-4 February), across Msheireb Downtown Doha venues M7 and Doha Design District, as well as other locations and venues in the area. Read more about the fair here. SPECIAL PROJECTS Marking a defining moment for the launch of Art Basel Qatar, the Special Projects program, curated by Art Basel Qatar Artistic Director Wael Shawky in close collaboration with Vincenzo de Bellis, Chief Artistic Officer & Global Director Art Basel Fairs, showcases a remarkable group of acclaimed voices from across the region. The nine selected projects by Abraham Cruzvillegas; Bruce Nauman; Hasan Khan; Khalil Rabah; Nalini Malani; Nour Jaouda; Rayyane Tabet; Sumayya Vally; and Sweat Variant (Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born); will debut groundbreaking works that respond to and expand on the fair’s overarching theme, Becoming. Spanning film and moving image, sculpture, performance, and architecture, they explore the environmental and social histories that have shaped contemporary life in the MENASA region and beyond. Together, the artist’s installations and performances promise to transform the inaugural edition into a landmark experience, offering audiences bold perspectives, immersive interventions, and powerful reflections on transformation, identity, and the future. Featured projects include: - 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 (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 titled 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 (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 (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 (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’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’s (b.1983, Beirut, Lebanon) What Dreams May Come | ???? ?????? ???? ???? 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 (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) describes the collaborative practice of Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born. Their project includes 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.
GALLERY HIGHLIGHTS - The central Gallery sector unites 87 leading galleries from 31 countries and territories, including 16 making their Art Basel debut. It showcases works by 84 international artists, with more than half hailing from across the region. Under the curatorial direction of Wael Shawky, these presentations explore the central curatorial theme of Becoming. Art Basel Qatar will take place across M7 and the Doha Design District in downtown Msheireb, both recognized as prominent hubs for Qatar’s creative industries and contemporary cultural programming.
A selection of gallery highlights comprises: - Almine Rech (Paris) presents works by Ali Cherri that engage with the idea of what it means to “become animal”. Drawing from philosophy, Cherri blends myth, sculpture, and symbolism to challenge how we see ourselves in relation to animals.
- Anthony Meier and Waddington Custot (Mill Valley, California and Dubai) present a joint solo presentation dedicated to Etel Adnan (1925-2021), whose radiant and intimate paintings have shaped modern and contemporary art across cultures. This focused booth gathers works that reflect the core themes of her practice—landscape, memory, displacement, and a profound spiritual connection to place.
- Athr Gallery (Jeddah) showcases Ahmed Mater’s continued engagement with Makkah through a photographic survey that reveals a city expanding like a living organism across shifting terrain. Rather than a fixed or eternal form, Makkah emerges as a living process, shaped by invisible economies, logistical operations, and architectural ambitions seeking meaning in a terrain still learning to inhabit itself.
- Galerie Chantal Crousel (Paris) shows nine works by Mona Hatoum, including two new pieces from 2025. Using grids, cages, and altered materials, the works examine exposure, protection, and constraint. The presentation includes Drawing Heat IV (1) (2017), Drawing Heat III (1) (2017), Drawing Heat II (1) (2017), Mirror (2025), Divide (2025), Untitled (wall cabinet) II (2017), Cage for One (2022), and Inside Out (2019).
- David Zwirner (New York) presents four major paintings from Marlene Dumas’s Against the Wall series (2009-2010). Based on media images of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the works explore contested meaning, shifting borders, and the instability of identity shaped by conflict and memory.
- Gypsum Gallery (Cairo) presents Mohamed Monaiseer’s ongoing work I, Pet Lion. Drawing from heraldry, flags, and children’s strategy games, his embroidered and painted textiles trace how symbols of conflict enter everyday visual culture. Repetition, appliqué, and calligraphic marks expose how the logic of warfare appears as play.
- Hauser & Wirth (Zurich) presents works by Philip Guston (1913-1980) tracing his shift from 1960s abstraction to 1970s figuration. Through ink, drawing, and painting, Guston pursued raw emotional clarity, treating stylistic transformation as an artistic necessity.
- Gallery Isabelle (Dubai) dedicates its presentation to the late Emirati artist Hassan Sharif (1951-2016), a pioneering figure in conceptual art and experimental practice in the Gulf. This presentation approaches his practice through studies, works in progress, and a local language in the making. It considers how two seemingly opposed trajectories, Objects and Semi-Systems, coexist within a single philosophical approach.
- Karma International (Zurich) presents a solo project by Syrian-born artist Simone Fattal (b. 1942), whose practice explores the intersections of memory, mythology, and place. Drawing from ancient civilizations, literature, and personal history, Fattal’s work evokes timeless human themes through minimalist forms which seamlessly blend with the theme, Becoming.
- Lia Rumma Gallery (Milan) showcases a new body of work by Shirin Neshat titled Do U Dare! (2025). Blending a haunting video installation and striking photographic works to interrogate the commodification of identity, the rise of authoritarianism, and the fragile line between self and spectacle.
- Pace Gallery (New York) features Lynda Benglis’s Elephant Necklace Circle (2016), a suite of thirty-seven hand-formed ceramic sculptures. The twisting, organic forms capture gesture becoming object, embodying Benglis’s idea of the “frozen gesture.”
- Sfeir-Semler Gallery (Beirut) presents a selection of works by MARWAN (1934-2016) that trace the evolution of his practice from the 1960s through the 1980s, culminating in his iconic Heads: meditative studies of interiority rendered in oil and watercolor. These portraits function as encounters with the human soul, transcending geographic or historical boundaries.
- The Third Line (Dubai) debuts Sophia Al-Maria’s HiLux (2025), using the Toyota Hilux as an entry point into Gulf histories of fossil fuel, masculinity, mobility, and myth. The works reimagine the vehicle as a site of resilience, memory, and autonomy, offering a visual and sonic meditation on what endures amid collapse.
QATAR MUSEUMS EXHIBITIONS AND PUBLIC ART ON VIEW DURING THE SHOW Art Basel Qatar takes place alongside a vibrant range of exhibitions and cultural programs across Qatar Museums institutions, underscoring the nation’s stature as a hub for artistic innovation and cross-cultural dialogue. Alongside celebrated public artworks such as Richard Serra’s East-West/West-East and Olafur Eliasson’s Shadows Travelling on the Sea of the Day, the exhibitions program includes two major exhibitions marking the 15th anniversary of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art; two landmark presentations dedicated to the life and work of the renowned architect behind the Museum of Islamic Art, I. M. Pei; and a groundbreaking exhibition co-curated architects Rem Koolhaas and Samir Bantal that reimagines the rural landscape as a space for sustainability, innovation, and future living. Qatar Museums Exhibitions Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art - On view until February 9, 2026
‘we refuse_d’ brings together more than 15 contemporary artists from the Arab world whose works explore themes of resistance, care, and resilience through new commissions and collaborative installations. - On view until August 8, 2026
‘Resolutions: Celebrating 15 Years of Mathaf’ offers a renewed perspective on the museum’s acclaimed permanent collection, tracing the evolution of Arab modernism through key moments in Mathaf’s institutional history. ALRIWAQ - On view until February 14, 2026
‘I. M. Pei: Life Is Architecture’ is the first full-scale retrospective of Pei’s seven-decade career. Curated and organized by M+ in 2024, it brings together more than 400 objects, including original drawings, architectural models, photographs, films, and archival documentation from institutional and private holdings that reveal Pei’s unparalleled vision. ALRIWAQ - Performance Installation in MIA Park - On view until February 7, 2026
Rirkrit Tiravanija’s interactive installation untitled 2025 (no bread no ashes) reinterprets the bakery oven as both a functional tool and powerful cultural symbol. Inspired by Argentine artist Victor Grippo’s 1972 performance in Buenos Aires, the installation invites visitors to experience traditional ovens from the region as sites for social interaction, emphasizing connection, shared labor, and cultural identity. Every Friday, visitors are invited to gather and reflect through a series of baking programs showcasing different types of breads from diverse cultural traditions. The installation is organized by Rubaiya Qatar, an international contemporary art quadrennial’s inaugural edition in November 2026. Museum of Islamic Art - On view until February 14, 2026
‘I. M. Pei and the Making of the Museum of Islamic Art: From Square to Octagon and Octagon to Circle’ present original sketches, models, early photographs, and archival documents - many displayed publicly for the first time - to retrace Pei’s process of transforming centuries of tradition into the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha. QM Gallery Katara - On view until February 7, 2026
‘The Rooted Nomad: MF Husain’ is a fully immersive, multi-sensory experiential project presenting works by Maqbool Fida Husain one of India’s iconic artists, who lived his final years in Qatar. Through a distinguished portfolio of works that weave together myth, memory, and modernity, the exhibition reflects Husain’s vision of India as both an ancient civilization and a postcolonial nation. The exhibition was conceptualized and produced by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. Qatar Preparatory School and The National Museum of Qatar - On view until April 29, 2026
Spanning a geographic arc from Africa through the Middle East and Central Asia to China, ‘Countryside: A Place to Live, Not to Leave’ highlights a region deeply connected by history and still home to a majority of the world’s population. Through installations, research, and storytelling, the exhibition challenges the dominant urban narrative and invites visitors to explore how rural life can offer more humane and ecological answers to today’s global crises. 3-2-1 Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum - On view until March 7, 2026
‘Sneakers Unboxed: Studio to Street’ features more than 200 pairs of sneakers displayed alongside photographs, films, and archival materials. Highlights include rare and limited-edition designs as well as an exclusive presentation of Virgil Abloh’s celebrated sneaker creations. Public Art Qatar Museum’s extensive collection of public art includes works by local, regional and international artists throughout the nation. Highlights include: - Richard Serra’s East-West/West-East, Brouq Nature Reserve
- Olafur Eliasson’s Shadows Travelling on the Sea of the Day, Al Zubarah
- Shezad Dawood’s Doha Modern Playground, Al Masrah Park
- Mehdi Moutashar’s Aspire House, Aspire Park
- Shua'a Ali, Tawazun, Msheireb Downtown Doha
- Peter Fischli & David Weiss’s Rock on Top of Another Rock, MIA Park
- Rashid Johnson’s Village of the Sun, Old Airport Park
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