While much of the excitement of the inaugural Art Basel Qatar lies in the main galleries section, the special projects programme should not be overlooked.
Featuring monumental architectural and mixed-media installations and performances, the programme is part of what makes Art Basel locally grounded yet globally resonant. This event has 10 site-specific commissions in public spaces around Msheireb, in Doha, marking the largest group of public works ever realised for an Art Basel show in its more than 50-year history.
For artistic director Wael Shawky, this was essential to the Doha platform’s DNA, as it serves to create dialogue and promote critical thinking through art, connect the local community to the fair and offer a more conceptual side to the event.
“It was very important to make the first edition of Art Basel Qatar more like a statement of this region, which is not only a place for money and marketplace, but also quality,” Shawky tells The National.
“The special projects are a big part of this. One of the first ones people will see in Doha Design District is by Palestinian artist Khalil Rabah, which for me, was a grounding moment for visitors, because this building is usually for high-end furniture brands and shopping, and now an art fair.
“In the middle of all this commercialism, we put Rabah’s installation as a moment on intellectual discourse. We need people to discuss and be capable of a new analysis and language on art, but just at a commercial level.”
Walking into the building, Rabah’s Transition, among other things is akin to a chaotic souk or flea market, with viewers able to weave between stacks of school chairs, heaps of broken chandeliers and ornate furniture piled around the large atrium.
Made from domestic and industrial objects from scrapyards and junk sales around the region, Rabah intends the work to be an index of displaced objects that asks the viewer to rethink value, unlock memories and interrogate the politics of space. “It’s almost an archive of collective memory of the region. I wanted the plan to be a bit like an archaeological site of collected objects, debris of sorts,” Rabah says.
“It was created as a contrast between what is presented in the fair and what these objects are – a humbling challenge to the art market. At first, it appears very chaotic, but there is also an order here, a new form of categorising. What’s nice is people have been responding, connecting with certain objects and can relate in different ways.”
Between the M7 and Doha Design District buildings, South African architect Sumayya Vally has created a sprawling modular majlis titled In the Assembly of Lovers, which draws from the forms of historic public spaces across the Islamic world.
From the Great Mosque of Cordoba and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem to Gaza’s Omari Grand Mosque and Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square, the functional installation aims to reimagine how collective presence can shape architecture.
“The title is from a poem that has been attributed to, among others, [Iraqi Sufi poet] Rabia Al Adawiyya and the full line of the poem says ‘in the assembly of lovers be a lamp, a lifeboat or a ladder', meaning help each other,” Vally says.
“The work is almost like an inhabitable drawing with archaeological traces that come from many different sites of gathering. Many sites – mosques, churches, synagogues, but then also marketplaces, streets, public squares, places of coexistence and expression for people, and really places of gathering that have been lost. It’s a symbolic coming together of places and people from around the world, from our past, to connect our physical bodies and presences with our lineages.”
The floor is engraved with architectural plans and layouts from these sites and, as the fair goes on, the pieces will be moved and reconfigured as needed, from talks and discussions to poetry readings.
Slightly further afield at the Mohammed bin Jassim House is Lebanese artist Rayyane Tabet’s What Dreams May Come. The monumental pavilion made from real and fake palm tree fronds is a moment of serenity and peace away from the ruckus of the fair.
“The pavilion consists of two intersecting circular structures, each 10 metres in diameter and 7.5 metres high, overlapping to form a shared, sheltered interior,” Tabet says. “One volume is clad in natural palm fronds sourced from date farms in Doha, while the other is wrapped in artificial fronds, creating a tactile dialogue between the organic and the manufactured.
“This confrontation between materials mirrors the broader transition from the natural to the synthetic, from the real to the imagined, a key register of ‘becoming’ in the Gulf’s rapidly shifting cultural and ecological landscapes.”
Borrowing its title from Hamlet’s soliloquy, the project reflects on the moment between wakefulness and sleep – a threshold charged with possibility, uncertainty and imaginative force.
Inside M7, Libyan artist Nour Jaouda presents A House Between Two Houses, a rusted metal frame with hand-dyed textiles forming an imagined rest house. The large architectural structure, resembling draped scaffolding, represents temporary stillness in the reality of constant change.
“I wanted it to occupy a space between transformation and decay, so it has a feeling of memory, but also something that represents the future,” says Jaouda. “I was influenced by an architect called Hassan Fathy, whose work and architectural drawings are inspired by emotional subjectivity, with drawings from multiple viewpoints.
“The textile elements are about mourning lost landscapes. They’re all made with organic dyes and a lot of the forms within the tapestries reflect indigenous plants from lost landscapes. So it's almost a memorial piece that looks back at the past and at the moment in-between, in order to move forward.”
Art Basel Qatar runs until February 7
