Art Basel Qatar to show digital projection by Bruce Nauman

The inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar art fair (February 3 to 7, 2026) is to feature immersive interventions using digital projection at an architectural scale, both indoor and out, as part of a recently announced Special Projects program featuring artists who work with moving image, film, sculpture, performance, and architecture.

One of the Special Projects will be by the influential, boundary-breaking, US artist Bruce Nauman. Nauman, who has created in video, sculpture, performance, neon, installation, and sound in a six-decade career — including working  with Conductron Corporation in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1968 on a series of holograms — will present Beckett’s Chair Portrait Rotated (2025), a new three-dimensional video work.

Nauman's new work will be projected on a massive scale, in what a fair statement describes as “an enveloping field of light and motion” in the interior of the grand theatre at M7, the centre for innovation in fashion and design in Msheireb Downtown Doha.

Another large-format digital presentation will be made by the Karachi-born, Mumbai-based, video artist Nalini Malani, whose work engages with the experience of migration following the partition of India in 1947. Malani will be presenting a projection on the facade of M7 of a single-channel version of her nine-channel iPad-drawing-based stop-motion video My Reality is Different (2022).

Malani's work engages critically with 25 historic paintings — by artists such as Caravaggio, Bronzino, Jan van der Venne and Johann Zoffany — from the collections of two UK museums, the National Gallery, London, and the Holburne Museum, Bath. 

The fair content is being planned by its Artistic Director, the Egyptian-born artist Wael Shawky, who is known for his large-scale multimedia performance and video pieces touching on historical and colonial subjects, working in collaboration with Vincenzo de Bellis, Chief Artistic Officer & Global Director Art Basel Fairs. “The theme ‘Becoming’,” Shawky said in a launch statement, in October 2025, “is a meditation on change, on how humanity reshapes the ways we live, believe, and create meaning.” 

M7 will be the main location for the fair, which will also be presented across the downtown Design District of the Qatari capital. The fair will depart, Art Basel said in a launch statement in October 2025, from the traditional booth model “to present an open-format exhibition in which artist presentations respond to a central curatorial theme of ‘Becoming’.” 

The Special Projects program, announced on December 15, 2025, includes artists from the Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian region (MENASA) and beyond who work with film and moving image, sculpture, performance, and architecture. They include Malani; Nauman; Abraham Cruzvillegas; Hasan Khan; Khalil Rabah; Nour Jaouda; Rayyane Tabet; Sumayya Vally; and Sweat Variant (Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born). 

The gallery presentations announced to date, which will feature 87 spaces representing 84 artists from 31 countries, include work by the Seoul-based artist and composer Yunchul Kim. The artist, who works in installation, drawings, sound, texts and other media, is showing Subluminal Resonance Chamber (SRC) (2025) with the Seoul gallery Barakat Contemporary.

Yunchul Kim, founder of Studio Locus Solus in Seoul, is a member of the art and science project group Fluid Skies and of Liquid Things, an artistic research project at the University of Applied Arts, in Vienna, Austria.

The Special Projects program contributes to Art Basel Qatar having the largest outdoor and site-responsive program yet presented by the fair company. It also ties in with the extensive public art collection in Qatar — which includes Richard Serra’s towering sculpture East-West/West-East (2014), in the desert setting of Brouq Nature Reserve — and a massive institution-building program run by Qatar Museums (QM), which was founded in 2005 to encourage the development of regional arts and crafts and to develop cultural tourism.

Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, founded in 2010, is located in Education City, Qatar, in a building renovated by the architect Jean-François Bodin (a campus extension, to be designed by the Paris-based architect Lina Ghotmeh was announced on December 18, 2025). Jean Nouvel’s spectacular National Museum of Qatar, like an elegant sequence of giant, shade-giving, rose petals, opened in 2019. Two other institutions with buildings still under construction are the Lusail Museum and Art Mill Museum.

With a new building by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron due to open in 2029, Lusail will house the world’s largest collection of Orientalist paintings.

Art Mill Museum, which will house the national collection of global Modern and contemporary art since the 1830s in a flour mill remodelled by the Chilean practice Elemental, led by the architect Alejandro Aravena — with the intention of showing art of all regions of the globe on an equal basis — is due to open on Doha’s waterfront in 2032.

QM is headed by Sheikha Al Mayassa, the sister of the ruling emir, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. She is also a leading figure in the Art for Tomorrow conference series, dedicated to the future of art and technology, presented annually by the Democracy & Culture Foundation with QM, the conference’s founding partner. The last three conferences were held in Italy— in Florence (2023), Venice (2024) and Milan (2025) respectively. The conference’s 2026 iteration takes place in Qatar (April 12-16, 2026), to coincide with the opening of the Design Doha biennial (April 12 to June 30, 2026) and Art Dubai art fair (April 17-19, 2026).

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