QATAR
This week, Doha becomes the gravitational centre of regional attention. Art Basel Qatar (5–7 Feb), curated by Wael Shawky, brings together 87 galleries from 31 countries in an open-format presentation across the city. Shawky described the fair as a space where artistic, educational, and market logics converge, stating: “What interested me about this role was the possibility of an art fair that doesn’t separate the market from education, but understands them as part of the same ecosystem. The open format of Art Basel Qatar allows artists to present complete thoughts rather than fragments.”
Positioning the fair within a longer cultural arc, Her Excellency Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, Chairperson of Qatar Museums, framed Art Basel Qatar as a structural, long-term regional project rather than a one-off event: “This is the beginning of a bold, exciting, and truly unique undertaking – one that merges with and amplifies the cultural and artistic ecosystem we have been building, piece by piece, for the past fifty years.”
Beyond the fair, a citywide programme led by Qatar Museums unfolds across Doha. At the Museum of Islamic Art, Jenny Holzer presents SONG, a new site-responsive exhibition that premiered during the Art Basel Qatar Welcome Party, alongside Empire of Light: Visions and Voices of Afghanistan (2 February–30 May), surveying more than five millennia of Afghan art and history through themes of cultural exchange and continuity, and AMO/OMA’s Countryside: A Place to Live, Not to Leave.
At Fire Station, three solo exhibitions by international artists are on view: Chung Seoyoung: Endless Facts (from 20 April 2026), Haroon Mirza: Everything was, is and always will be (from 31 May), and Ho Tzu Nyen: Hotel Aporia (from 31 May). Meanwhile, the National Museum of Qatar presents Atharna 2025: Unearthing Qatar’s Ancient Textile Factories, A Nation’s Legacy, A People’s Memory: Fifty Years Told, and Lehmesa: Return by Moonlight.
Concurrently, launched by Qatar Museums is Rubaiya Qatar, a new nationwide contemporary art quadrennial under ALRIWAQ Art + Architecture, bringing together exhibitions, commissions, public art, and research-driven programmes across the country every four years. Its inaugural edition is anchored by Unruly Waters, a large-scale exhibition featuring more than 50 artists and historical artefacts to examine ecological, maritime, and cultural connections linking the Gulf with wider Asian histories.
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
Early February in the UAE moves with intention. Dubai and Abu Dhabi adopt a deliberate pace, allowing exhibitions to settle and unfold.
In Dubai, Jameel Arts Centre hosts Jumana Emil Abboud’s The Storyteller and the Obedient Tide (27 Jan – 28 Jun). The exhibition continues the artist’s long engagement with Palestinian folklore, where land and water operate as living archives. Memory is gathered through elemental forces, proposing continuity even in the face of erosion.
In Abu Dhabi, Shamsa Al Omaira’s Hard like Tears, Soft like Glass at Iris Projects (23 Jan – 30 Apr) marks her first solo exhibition in over a decade. Developed through a year-long mentorship with Nadine Khalil, the work approaches fragility through material restraint and careful experimentation. While Rizq Art Initiative (RAi) presents Like Gold (until 31 Mar) as a collateral exhibition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, curated by Murtaza Vali, tracing gold across geographies and histories, from Indian Ocean trade routes to its shifting symbolic weight in contemporary practice.
Sharjah opens the month with Sunkissed (8 Feb – 3 May), Ahaad Alamoudi’s first solo exhibition in the UAE at Sharjah Art Foundation. Her work projects speculative futures onto the textures of everyday Khaleeji life, where sunlight, leisure, and surface register subtle social change.
Also in the city, The reEarth International Art Prize 2025, described as the world’s largest international art prize for children and youth, has launched its first exhibition in Sharjah in collaboration with FANN and the Xposure Festival, with further shows planned in Auckland and Venice. Winners selected by an international jury will be announced on 15 February 2026, marking the culmination of a global programme showcasing young artists across three continents.
KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA
Riyadh continues to assert itself as a site for speculative practice. At Diriyah Art Futures, Of the Earth: Earthly Technologies to Computational Biologies (until 16 May) explores the convergence of digital art and environmental systems, foregrounding practices that move between computation and ecology.
Hafez Gallery stages two concurrent exhibitions reflecting the breadth of regional artistic language. Works by Attyat Sayed and El Dessouki Fahmi (13 Jan – 28 Feb) revisit press illustration as a mode of observation and documentation, while Faisal Samra’s Other Body Series (21 Jan – 21 Mar) turns inward, using sculptural form to probe memory and the architecture of consciousness.
In AlUla, Arduna (1 Feb – 15 Apr), presented at the Daimumah Pavilion, marks a significant milestone in the development of the region’s forthcoming contemporary art museum. Realised through a major collaboration between the Centre Pompidou and the Royal Commission for AlUla, with the support of AFALULA, the exhibition brings together more than 80 works from international and regional artists, including key loans from the Centre Pompidou, to examine how modern and contemporary practices have addressed humanity’s evolving relationship with nature and the transformation of landscapes.
LEBANON
Beirut’s programme this week leans toward continuity and transnational dialogue.
At Sfeir-Semler Gallery Downtown, Bayan Kiwan’s Intimate Trespasses (16 Jan – 28 Mar) examines domestic space as a site where political and personal narratives intersect. Working across drawing, installation, and textile-based forms, Kiwan approaches the home as both refuge and constraint, tracing how intimate gestures, routines, and objects become charged under conditions of displacement, inheritance, and uneven power.
At Difaf Gallery, Wassim Kays’ focus on drawing-led and process-based practices extends his work from notebook sketches to the weaving ateliers of Arsal with From Line to Loom (4 Feb – 1 Mar) an exhibition that translates drawing into textile through collaborative production.
OF TIME, presented at Takeover Beirut (31 January–5 February) and curated by M. Carmen Lane and Allison Hasiba Abdallah, unfolds as a mobile exhibition of testimony centred on oral history, movement, and embodied memory. Connecting contributors from Turtle Island to Lebanon, it brings together artists Zach Hussein, Tarik Kazaleh, Rhonda Khalifeh, Joe Namy, Jenna Hamed, Jenin Yaseen, Andre + Evan Lenox-Samour, and Abdallah Kassem, whose practices shaped by displacement, survival, and transmission position lived experience as both method and archive across shifting geographies.
Beyond the galleries, Lebanon’s Oscar submission A Sad and Beautiful World (screening across Lebanon), directed by Cyril Aris, situates contemporary Lebanese cinema within ongoing social and spatial histories, tracing a decades-spanning love story against the backdrop of the country’s political upheavals; the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the People’s Choice Award.
The WORLD
Internationally, the week includes the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair (5–8 Feb) at La Mamounia, Morocco, continuing its role as a key platform for contemporary African practice. This year’s edition foregrounds cross-continental dialogues, with a particular emphasis on diasporic perspectives, material experimentation, and artists engaging histories of migration, ecology, and political transformation across Africa and its global networks.
In Kuwait, I Dreamt We Dreamt of Eden (28 Jan – 19 Mar) is a group exhibition organised by Hunna Art in collaboration with Hayaty Diaries features five artists exploring varied interpretations of paradise by approaching it as a shifting idea shaped by memory, imagination, and lived experience. Rather than presenting Eden as a fixed or distant ideal, the exhibition considers it as something that appears in fragments; resurfacing through moments of tenderness, loss, and hope. Across the works, paradise becomes less a place than a recurring human impulse: the desire to recover a sense of goodness once felt and to carry that search forward.
In Berlin, Echoes of Tumult (24 Jan–22 Mar) brings together artists addressing systemic, political, and ecological precarity through research-driven and materially diverse practices. Featuring works by Essa Grayeb and Hoda Afshar, among others, the exhibition examines how states of crisis shape bodies, landscapes, and forms of representation in an era of accelerated instability.
Youssef Taki’s first solo exhibition, At the Image’s Edge (17 Jan–7 Mar), at AWL in Spain examines migration, visibility, and the rewriting of memory through photography and installation. The exhibition interrogates the limits of the photographic image as a documentary tool, positioning it instead as a site of fragmentation, absence, and reconstruction.
In Milan, Mona Hatoum’s Over, Under and In Between (29 Jan–9 Feb) at Fondazione Prada presents a major survey of the artist’s practice, activating the site through recurring formal and conceptual elements such as the web, map, and grid. Spanning sculpture, installation, and mixed media, the exhibition foregrounds Hatoum’s sustained engagement with displacement, bodily vulnerability, and systems of control, situating these concerns within the architectural logic of the space.
In the United States, Farah Al Qasimi’s Psychic Repair (30 Jan–7 Jun) at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah examines everyday life as a site of psychological and cultural negotiation. Through photography and video, the exhibition reflects on intimacy, gender, and visual excess, using humour and heightened colour to probe the emotional undercurrents of domestic and public spaces.
Yasmina Alaoui’s Sarabande (5 Feb–8 Mar) at Comptoir des Mines Galerie in Marrakech explores questions of identity, heritage, and visual language across photography and painting. Drawing on Moroccan and Andalusian references, the works navigate ornament, corporeality, and symbolism, positioning the body as a site of cultural inscription and transformation.