If Wael Shawky could, he would have invited more than nine artists to participate in Art Basel Qatar’s Special Projects. Time and resources were the limits, the artist and Artistic Director of Art Basel’s first edition in Doha continues – and time, more than anything else, is the one constraint that truly worries him. For Shawky and the artists he has commissioned, time is not simply logistical – it is the very substance of their work: how history accumulates, how progress accelerates, and how humanity barrels forward under the banner of development.

For its inaugural edition in Doha, Art Basel has committed to nine ambitious, site-specific projects unfolding across Msheireb Downtown Doha. This marks a new milestone for the fair as it is the largest group of new commissions ever presented at an Art Basel show. Six are staged outdoors and three indoors, activating key public and cultural sites with sculptures, installations, and performances by a carefully calibrated mix of regional and international voices, including Nour Jaouda, Khalil Rabah, Bruce Nauman, Sumayya Vally, Hassan Khan, and Rayyane Tabet. It is a lineup that mirrors the fair itself – globally legible and regionally grounded.

The anticipation around the fair matches its ambition. More than 600 galleries applied to participate, with 87 selected, including 16 first-time Art Basel participants such as Hafez Gallery (Jeddah/Riyadh), Gallery Misr (Cairo), Le Violon Bleu (Tunis), Saleh Barakat Gallery (Beirut), and Tabari Artspace (Dubai). Shawky also notes that many international galleries are bringing artists from the region into Doha – an important corrective to the long-standing imbalance in visibility.

Running an art fair, Shawky says, is ‘a walk in the park’ compared to directing Doha’s Fire Station, which he is in the process of transforming into something akin to a global art school – an expanded, international counterpart to MASS Alexandria, the program he leads in Egypt. ‘Here, I’m only thinking as artistic director,’ he says. ‘Art Basel has an incredible logistics team. My role is to filter applications and choose artists – the thinking part, the fun part.’

That thinking is anchored by the fair’s overarching theme, ‘Becoming’, which threads through both the gallery presentations and the Special Projects. ‘They all share a concern about the dream of development humanity has,’ Shawky explains. ‘This exists in their work – at least from my reading. Everything has to do with this concept: becoming, how humanity is running after becoming better and higher.’

Few artists articulate that pursuit – and its discontents – more forcefully than Hassan Khan. The Egyptian artist, who divides his time between Berlin and Cairo and is represented by Galerie Chantal Crousel, returns to Doha after a 15-year absence. His last major presentation in the city was in 2011, when he participated in one of Mathaf’s landmark opening exhibitions, ‘Told Untold Retold’, curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath. That show, now regarded as a turning point for contemporary Arab art, featured Khan’s hypnotic single-channel video Jewel, in which two men dance beside an illuminated speaker as shaabi music – composed by Khan himself – fills the space.

For Art Basel Qatar, Khan presents a concert built around newly written and produced songs, performed through a customized digital system developed for him by Computer Music Designer Olivier Pasquet. The lyrics are raw, unflinching, and politically charged. In Little Castles (2025), he asks, ‘Have you seen an official order? / That proves a genocide order?’ In Trust (2025), the refrain ‘Who wants to be alone?’ repeats like a plea in a world unravelling.

‘The world is not in a great place,’ Khan says plainly. ’Gaza is beyond belief – not just that it happened, but that it is accepted. A portion of the globe thinks it’s OK. It’s not promising for our future.’ Yet Khan resists didacticism. ‘It’s an artwork,’ he insists. ‘I’m interested in connecting with audiences, discovering new ways of understanding the world we live in now, and opening possibilities. I’ve always respected art’s ability to not be fully decipherable.’

That tension – between clarity and opacity, urgency and ambiguity – also animates Khalil Rabah’s contribution. Like Khan, Rabah is a Told Untold Retold alumnus, and his return to Doha feels both cyclical and unresolved. His new project, Transition, Among Other Things, assembles fragments of domestic, institutional, and industrial debris into sculptural architectures that function as living indexes of memory and resistance. Each object is reactivated, repositioned, and charged with political resonance, prompting viewers to consider how cycles of use, abandonment, and revaluation mirror broader environmental and geopolitical realities.

If Rabah’s work interrogates the afterlives of objects, Sumayya Vally’s In the Assembly of Lovers examines the afterlives of gathering itself through an ‘infinite majlis’ – a never-ending stacking of seating elements installed in Al Baraha Square. Majlis in Arabic means ‘sitting places’ or ‘sitting rooms’ and describes various kinds of gathering places across the Arab world. Every day of the fair, the elements are reconfigured into an intimate space for conversation and performance. On the final day, the structure coalesces into a monumental collective form. Drawing inspiration from historic gathering spaces across Kashmir, Spain, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria – as well as the imagery found in mystical and Sufi poetry, Vally frames the work as an architecture of care. In such poetic traditions, In the Assembly of Lovers is imagined as a place of refuge and responsibility: ‘Be a lamp, a lifeboat or a ladder’ as advice for how to exist among others, especially in times of difficulty, uncertainty, or injustice. For Vally, whose South African upbringing informs her sensitivity to communal healing, the majlis becomes both refuge and proposition: a melancholic yet hopeful space for being together.

Across these projects, common denominators emerge clearly. These works grapple with displacement, endurance, refusal, and the fragile promise of progress. They question linear narratives of development and instead propose becoming as a state of flux – uneven, contested, and unresolved. Shawky has suggested that the Gulf itself can be read as a metaphor for becoming: a region defined by acceleration, ambition, and reinvention, yet haunted by questions of sustainability, memory, and consequence.

In this sense, Art Basel Qatar’s Special Projects do more than complement the fair – they ground it. They restore narrative to a space often dominated by market logic, re-centring the artist as an active agent rather than a distant producer. By embedding these works into the city’s fabric, the fair reduces the distance between art, audience, and context – an approach Shawky sees as essential. ‘Artists usually feel disconnected from art fairs,’ he says. ‘Here, we’re trying to reduce that gap.’

If Becoming is the question Art Basel Qatar poses, these projects suggest that the answer lies not in arrival but in attentiveness: to history, to rupture, to the slow work of meaning-making. In a world obsessed with what comes next, they ask us to pause – if only briefly – and consider what we are becoming, and at what cost.