This is a special edition of Breakfast with ARTnews, to coincide with Art Basel Qatar. To receive the newsletter in your inbox every weekday, sign up here.
Here in Doha, it is nearly impossible not to know that Art Basel is in town. Red banners announcing the fair line the streets of the Msheireb district, where it will open on Tuesday across the M7 building, the Design District, and other nearby venues.
This is an important moment for arts and culture in Qatar—and one that extends far beyond the arrival of a new fair. The National Museum is celebrating its 50th anniversary; the Museum of Islamic Art is marking its 15th. Both milestones were celebrated in October with a week of festivities under the banner Qatar Creates. In that sense, Art Basel feels like a capstone. Qatar and Art Basel share a pivotal moment in the early 1970s: the fair was inaugurated in Switzerland in 1970; a year later, Qatar gained independence, shedding its status as a British protectorate. Five years after that, the country opened the National Museum on the site of the Old Amiri Palace.
Art Basel’s arrival in Doha underscores how the development of a cultural scene here has always blended the imported and the homegrown—now with an ever-greater emphasis on the latter.
For its anniversary, the Museum of Islamic Art is hosting an exhibition that encapsulates Qatar’s ambitions by telling the story of the museum’s extraordinary building. In the 1990s, Qatar held an architectural competition and selected a winning proposal—but that was only the beginning. The emir was not satisfied and became determined to bring I. M. Pei out of retirement for the project. In 1999, Pei was persuaded to submit his own proposal, though he did so with a firm condition: Qatar would need to build him an island. The original site lay within the city, but Pei foresaw Doha’s rapid expansion and worried his building would be eclipsed. To truly stand apart, it would need to sit beyond the corniche, on its own plot of land in the Arabian Gulf. A starchitect coaxed out of retirement tends to get his way, and Pei did.
The Museum of Islamic Art—an ingenious synthesis of Islamic and Western architectural traditions and a study in proportion—is now reached by a bridge. Pei was right: Doha expanded, but when he died in 2019, his building remained the city’s most visible landmark, and it continues to be so today—a monument to both his vision and that of the country that commissioned it.
The museum’s story mirrors how Qatar engages with global talent and institutions: if the request is, give me the resources to deliver not just the best, but the best for you, the answer is often yes. This week, we’ll see what Art Basel has done with that remit.
What is already clear is that the encounter between an international brand and a local context has produced a fair with fewer than half the exhibitors of its Swiss flagship; an artist, Wael Shawky, as director; and a hybrid format that combines solo presentations with an open-plan layout. As Shawky put it at Monday’s press conference, the aim is to “place each artist’s practice in context” and ask visitors “to go slower and go deeper.” (Or, as Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz quipped at the same event: “It may look like a biennial, but everything is also for sale.”)
It is also clear that this is not a short-term commitment. Opening the press conference, Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, chairperson of Qatar Museums, announced that Herzog & de Meuron’s 366 Lusail Museum on Al Maha Island—about a half-hour drive north along the coast and expected to open in 2029—will serve as an expanded site for Art Basel Qatar. From there, she headed to the Doha Exhibition and Convention Center for a conversation with Los Angeles County Museum of Art director Michael Govan at Web Summit Qatar. It is one of roughly five international conferences and events unfolding in the country this week—which, in its own way, puts Art Basel into perspective
