Wael Shawky to Helm Inaugural Art Basel Qatar
112July 10, 2025
Egyptian artistWael Shawkyhas been named artistic director ofArt Basel Qatar, which is set to launch in Doha this coming February. Taking place across multiple venues—among them M7, the Doha Design District, and select public sites in Msheireb—the fair will platform galleries and artists from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Art Basel Qatar will eschew the traditional booth format in favor of an open layout, with galleries mounting solo presentations centering around a thematic structure supplied by Shawky and the event’s creative team.
“The opportunity to explore artistic practices from across the MENA region and beyond, within a framework that values research, narrative, and experimentation, is extremely meaningful to me,” said the Doha-based Shawky in a statement.
The theme of the inaugural Art Basel Qatar is “Becoming.” Presentations will respond to the ongoing transformation of the Gulf, described in a press release as “a region where oral traditions intersect with digital networks, and ancient trade routes are reimagined as contemporary flows of culture and capital.”
Shawky, who represented Egypt at last year’s Venice Biennale and has in the past decade been the subject of solo exhibitions at London’s Tate Modern, Austria’s Kunsthaus Bregenz, and New York’s MoMA PS1, is an unusual choice to lead the fair. Typically, the role of artistic director would go to an art-world professional, rather than an artist.
“We wanted to depart from the traditional fair approach while still being very much a fair,” Vincenzo de Bellis, Art Basel’s chief artistic officer and global director of fairs, told Artnews. “That is for two reasons: First, we wanted to develop our presence, and second, we want also to focus on the educational development of what the market could be. Therefore, it came naturally to look into a more unconventional direction.”