From sound and performance to architecture and spatial imagination, African artists take centre stage in Art Basel Qatar’s Special Projects programme, presenting powerful site-specific works that engage history, memory, and the idea of becoming across Msheireb Downtown Doha.
Marking a defining moment in the launch of Art Basel Qatar, the Special Projects programme unfolds as a constellation of nine ambitious, site-specific installations, sculptures, and performances across Msheireb Downtown Doha. Curated by Wael Shawky, Artistic Director of Art Basel Qatar, in close collaboration with Vincenzo de Bellis, Chief Artistic Officer and Global Director of Art Basel Fairs, the programme responds to the fair’s overarching theme, Becoming—a meditation on transformation, continuity, and future-making.
Within this landmark presentation, a strong cohort of African artists asserts a compelling presence, contributing works that speak to social turbulence, architectural memory, embodied knowledge, and emotional geographies shaped by African and diasporic experiences. Spanning sound, performance, installation, and architecture, these projects expand the conceptual and geographic reach of the inaugural edition, foregrounding African perspectives within a global contemporary art dialogue.
Hassan Khan (Egypt)
Project Title: Little Castles and Other Songs
Egyptian artist, composer, and writer Hassan Khan presents Little Castles and Other Songs, a live performance suite that premieres at Art Basel Qatar. Performed on a bespoke digital system developed with computer music designer and composer Olivier Pasquet, the work features a selection of Khan’s original songs written during a period marked by global instability and emotional unrest.
Blending music, technology, and poetic lyricism, the project captures the psychological texture of a world in flux. Khan’s performance channels vulnerability, resistance, and introspection, using sound as a tool to process political and personal uncertainty. In the context of Becoming, the work resonates as a sonic reflection on survival, adaptation, and the fragile architectures—emotional and societal—that people construct in times of upheaval.
Nour Jaouda (Libya)
Project Title: Rest House (imagined structure)
Libyan artist Nour Jaouda constructs an imagined “rest house” through an installation composed of intersecting steel walls, layered architectural drawings, and suspended textile fragments. Rejecting fixed geography, the project is shaped instead by emotional subjectivity, memory, and imagination, offering a spatial experience rooted in displacement and longing.
The skeletal, scaffold-like structure houses glimpses of dyed textiles that evoke forgotten or imagined landscapes, dissolving boundaries between rural and urban, past and future. Jaouda’s work embodies a state of continual becoming—where architecture is not static but provisional, fragile, and deeply personal. The installation reflects broader questions of home, exile, and reconstruction, particularly resonant within North African and Mediterranean histories of movement and rupture.
Sumayya Vally (South Africa)
Project Title: In the Assembly of Lovers
South African architect and cultural practitioner Sumayya Vally presents In the Assembly of Lovers, a continuously transforming majlis that reimagines architecture as a living, communal process. Drawing inspiration from historic public and sacred spaces across the Muslim world—including the Great Mosque of Córdoba, the Church of the Nativity, Gaza’s Omari Grand Mosque, and Beirut’s Martyr’s Square—the installation reflects on how collective presence gives form to space.
Named after a line attributed to the Iraqi mystic Rabia al-Adawiyya, the work calls for rebuilding through togetherness. Throughout the fair, the structure shifts configuration to host gatherings and conversations, becoming both a social and architectural organism. Vally’s project positions African and diasporic architectural thought at the heart of contemporary spatial discourse, proposing new models for how we gather, remember, and imagine futures together.
Sweat Variant – Okwui Okpokwasili (Nigeria/USA) & Peter Born
Project Title: Durational Movement Performance
Representing a powerful African diasporic presence, Sweat Variant—the collaborative practice of Nigerian-American artist Okwui Okpokwasili and composer Peter Born—presents a three-hour durational movement performance that unfolds without a fixed beginning or end. Four performers engage in sustained physical and relational exchange, testing the limits of endurance, attention, and collective memory.
Rooted in Okpokwasili’s ongoing exploration of embodied inheritance and ancestral knowledge, the work invites audiences to enter and exit freely, experiencing time as fluid rather than linear. Through movement, sound, and proximity, the performance reflects on care, burden, and interdependence, positioning the body as a site of history and becoming. The project underscores African and diasporic traditions of oral, physical, and communal knowledge transmission within a contemporary performance framework.
African Perspectives at the Heart of Art Basel Qatar
Together, these African-led Special Projects contribute critical, resonant voices to the inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar. Whether through sound, architecture, installation, or performance, the artists foreground lived experience, memory, and collective presence as tools for imagining new futures. Situated within Msheireb Downtown Doha, their works transform the urban landscape into a site of reflection, encounter, and possibility—affirming Africa’s central role in shaping contemporary global art conversations.
