Art Basel Qatar has listed the 87 galleries that will participate in its inaugural edition, due to run 5-7 February at M7 and the Doha Design District.
The fair, the fifth to bear the Art Basel label, is a joint venture between the art fair group and two Qatari institutions – Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) and QC+, a Qatar Chamber of Commerce enterprise that aims to “harness the value of cultural assets”. The country’s tourism organisation, Visit Qatar, is also on board as the fair’s lead sponsor.
The number of galleries is rather higher than the 50 or so that were originally expected, apparently because exhibitor interest was “strong” and the venues found a bit more space for the fair. Sixteen of the exhibitors, around 18 percent, will be showing at an Art Basel fair for the first time, which must have been one of the organisers’ goals.
Another would have been to get some of the blue-chip galleries to exhibit in Doha, and that too seems to have been achieved – the big names include Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Pace Gallery, David Zwirner, Thaddaeus Ropac, White Cube, Michael Werner Gallery, Lisson Gallery, Sadie Coles HQ, and Victoria Miro.
And there’s a decent number of Gulf galleries too: The Third Line, Tabari Artspace, Lawrie Shabibi, Green Art Gallery, and Gallery Isabelle, plus the multi-location Dubai-represented Leila Heller Gallery, Perrotin, and Waddington Custot.
It’s not only the partnership structure that sets Qatar apart from other Art Basels. Most of them usually have around 200 exhibitors; Qatar will have fewer than half of that.
Art Basel Qatar is the only one to have appointed an artistic director, the Egyptian-born but Doha-based artist Wael Shawky (right), who has come up with a biennial-style curatorial theme for the show – ‘Becoming’, described in the press release as describes as “a meditation on humanity’s constant transformation and the systems that shape how we live, believe, and create meaning”.
And Art Basel Qatar departs from the traditional booth model to present something more like an open-format exhibition in which artist presentations respond to the Becoming theme – with only one artist per booth, all of whom have been preannounced. So for instance Dubai galleries are showing the likes of Maryam Hoseini (Green Art Gallery), Hassan Sharif (Gallery Isabelle), and Hazem Harb (Tabari).
Vincenzo de Bellis, Art Basel’s chief artistic officer and global director of fairs (right), expanded on this: “One of Wael’s goals was to showcase the potential that artists from the region have and giving them a platform at the global level”. Indeed, more than half of the selected artists are from the MENASA region – though we could find only two Qataris, Bouthayna Al Muftah and the Qatari-American Sophia Al-Maria, being shown respectively by al markhiya gallery (the sole Qatari gallery at the fair) and The Third Line.
Shawky and de Bellis apparently selected the exhibiting galleries with input from a six-person committee comprising Sunny Rahbar of The Third Line and Mohammed Hafiz of Athr Gallery plus Lorenzo Fiaschi (Galleria Continua), Shireen Gandhy (Chemould Prescott Road), Daniela Gareh (White Cube) and Gordon VeneKlasen (Michael Werner Gallery).
Details of Art Basel Qatar are here; the full gallery list and the associated artists is here.
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