Art Basel is coming to Qatar for the first time — and that is a big moment. With its debut in the MENASA region, the fair is not just expanding geographically but signalling a shift in how the global art world is paying attention to the region. Spread across M7 and the Doha Design District in Msheireb Downtown Doha, the inaugural edition reflects Doha’s growing cultural ambition and its increasingly confident place in the international contemporary art conversation.

Running from February 5–7, the fair brings together 87 international galleries and showcases work by 84 artists, more than half of whom come from across the MENASA region. Instead of the familiar maze of booths, Art Basel Qatar takes a different approach: an open, fluid format centred on solo presentations. The idea is simple — slow things down, strip away distractions, and give each artist the space and attention their work deserves.

As always, let’s start with the one thing that holds the entire fair together: the theme. For its first edition, Art Basel Qatar is built around Becoming. At its core, it is about change — about how we are constantly evolving, and how the systems around us shape the way we live, think, believe, and make sense of the world.

That idea feels especially relevant in the Gulf, a region that has always been in motion. Here, oral traditions exist alongside digital networks, and ancient trade routes have turned into today’s flows of culture, money, and ideas. In this context, art isn’t just reflecting change — it is part of it, actively reshaping identities, belief systems, and social structures as they continue to evolve.

Art Basel Qatar’s first edition is led by Wael Shawky, who serves as Artistic Director. His background in film, performance, and storytelling brings a clear regional perspective to the fair — an important part of Art Basel’s first move into the MENASA region.

Working with him is Vincenzo de Bellis, Art Basel’s Chief Artistic Officer and Global Director of Fairs. Together, they set the fair’s direction and choose the galleries, keeping things thoughtful while staying connected to Art Basel’s global network.

One of the most talked-about moments of Art Basel Qatar’s inaugural edition is Jenny Holzer’s (a conceptual art icon) new project, SONG, unveiled on the eve of the fair at the Museum of Islamic Art. The site-responsive work takes over the museum’s façade and inner courtyard with large-scale text projections, accompanied by a choreographed performance of more than 700 drones — a striking way to set the tone for the fair’s first chapter in the region.

Holzer’s piece draws on poetry by Mahmoud Darwish, one of the most influential voices in modern Arabic literature, alongside texts by Nujoom Alghanem, whose writing and filmmaking explore memory, intimacy, and contemporary Emirati identity. By weaving Arabic and English text into public space through light and movement, SONG creates a powerful dialogue between language, architecture, and collective experience.

The best way to experience Art Basel Qatar is to take advantage of its slower, more focused format and really spend time with individual artists. This is a fair that rewards attention — and many of the most interesting voices come from the MENASA region, where questions of change, identity, and memory feel especially present.

Take Souad Abdelrasoul from Cairo (Gallery Misr), whose work often centres on bodies that feel in flux — stretched, fragmented, somewhere between human and something else. There is nothing fixed or stable in her imagery, which makes it feel closely connected to the fair’s wider idea of Becoming.

Also, Lawrie Shabibi will present a solo focus on Amir Nour (1939–2023). At the centre is Serpent (1970), an early work made from thirty-four curved steel pipes. The presentation also brings together two bronzes, Doll (1974) and One and One (1976), alongside a small group of rare lithographs from the 1960s, offering a concise look at how his sculptural language first took shape.

ATHR Gallery will present Ahmed Mater’s Temporal Migration, a major photographic project centred on Makkah. Rather than treating the city as a fixed place, Mater approaches it as something alive — constantly expanding, shifting, and reshaped by construction and technology. Movement, scale, and transformation are central here, revealing a landscape formed by both deep history and the pressure of change.

A very different sense of time emerges in Fractured Moment by Pakistani artist Rashid Rana, presented by Chemould Prescott Road. Built from CCTV footage of Gaza’s night sky, the work takes the form of a vast, dark field recalling Malevich’s Black Square. What initially feels still slowly reveals itself as unstable — flashes of airstrikes puncture the darkness, and the image keeps reconfiguring as each moment of a single night is recorded in real time.

Lodovico Corsini, together with François Ghebaly, will present Windy by Moroccan artist Meriem Bennani — a large-scale kinetic sculpture that is hard to miss. A cartoon-like tornado, it seems to have slipped out of an animated world and into physical space, blurring the line between 2D and 3D. Like much of Bennani’s work, the piece plays with absurdity and cultural clichés, mixing humour with a sharp awareness of how images, movement, and digital language shape the world around us.

Gallery Isabelle will present the work of late Emirati artist Hassan Sharif (1951–2016), a figure whose impact on the region’s contemporary art scene is hard to overstate. Using simple materials, repetition, and process, Sharif responded directly to the social and economic changes brought on by global capitalism, while remaining deeply rooted in his local environment. His work moves easily between the local and the global, the critical and the sincere — a balance that still feels strikingly relevant, and especially resonant in the context of Art Basel Qatar.

Also, you will see artworks of Pakistani artist Aiza Ahmed (Sargent’s Daughters gallery), presenting Footnotes, a project developed during her residency at Fire Station in Doha. The work grows out of Ahmed’s ongoing engagement with the daily, highly choreographed ceremony at the Wagah–Attari border, where marching, music, and repetition turn a border into a kind of performance.

In the installation, painted muslin panels hang at eye level, encouraging viewers to move through and around them, while plywood cut-out figures bring the imagery into the room. Soldiers and musicians appear fragmented and slightly off-beat, shifting the focus toward gesture, rhythm, and movement. The result feels quietly theatrical — turning the idea of a border into something fluid and unstable, shaped as much by bodies in motion as by lines on a map.

Of course, this is only a small part of what Art Basel Qatar has to offer. The fair brings together far more artists and practices than can be captured here, and that sense of abundance — of discovery unfolding over time — is very much part of the experience.