Wassan Al-Khudhairi Appointed Artistic Director of 2027 Art Basel Qatar
8May 21, 2026
The organizers ofArt Basel Qatarhave tappedWassan Al-Khudhairi, a specialist in modern and contemporary Arab art and the onetime founding director ofMathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, to serve as artistic director of the 2027 edition. The event will take place January 28–30, 2027, with preview days on January 26 and 27, and will be held in the Doha Design District and at the M7 Cultural Forum in Msheireb Downtown Doha. Al-Khudhairi succeeds Egyptian artist Wael Shawky, whooversaw the inaugural editionof the fair earlier this year.
Born in Kuwait to Iraqi parents, Al-Khudhairi lives and works in New York. Following her 2007–12 tenure at Mathaf, she served as curator of modern and contemporary art at the Birmingham Museum of Art from 2014 to 2017, and chief curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis from 2017 to 2023. She was a cocurator of the Ninth Gwangju Biennale (2012) and a co-artistic director of the Sixth Asian Art Biennial in Taichung (2017–18); most recently, she worked on the Fourth Hawai‘i Triennial (2025) as a member of the curatorial team. She is currently a partner in C/O: Curatorial Office.
The fair organizers also revealed the theme for the 2027 iteration. Titled “between / بين,” the 2027 event will explore the generative potential of a state of betweenness, highlighting cultural encounters. Al-Khudhairi in a statement said that the concept “emerged from a curiosity about what becomes possible when a space is allowed to stay open—not as an absence of definition, but as an invitation for connections across generations, geographies, and perspectives.”