From Oil to Art to Influence

Alina Khalitova

Mar 2

6 min read

Updated: Oct 4

Installation view, Art Basel Qatar, Doha, 2026. Photo by Lana Stalnaya.

Art Basel’s first Qatar edition opened in Doha in February 2026. Much of the attention went to the arrival of the brand in the Middle East. Less straightforward was the question of what the fair would do there. In the Gulf, contemporary art is closely tied to economic diversification, diplomatic ambition and urban development. A major fair brings collectors and galleries to a city, but it also helps establish that city as a place where cultural authority is exercised.¹

The organisers presented an artist-led event, spread across Msheireb and structured around the theme Becoming. Solo presentations and a slower pace promised something closer to an exhibition than a conventional fair. This curatorial proposal sat within a much larger programme. Across the Gulf, investment in sport, tourism, cultural institutions and artificial intelligence serves the pursuit of post-oil economies and influence beyond Western centres of power. The fair belongs to that programme, with implications for the art shown and the audiences it can reach.

Qatar’s right to host a major art fair is hardly in question. What deserves scrutiny is the place art is being given within a national strategy, and the compromises that place may require.

From oil wealth to cultural capital

Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984) describes the upheaval brought by oil to the Arabian Peninsula. Its account of modernisation is concerned with the speed at which familiar ways of life become unrecognisable. Memory, work and social relationships struggle to survive changes imposed on the landscape.

Four decades later, Gulf cities are still being remade. Museum districts, major architectural commissions and acquisitions have joined the expanding skylines, often carrying the names of established international institutions. Economic diversification explains some of this investment. Another motive is the conversion of finite oil wealth into a more lasting claim to cultural importance.

Pierre Bourdieu’s account of taste and prestige in Distinction helps explain how that conversion works. Institutions confer authority on particular objects, practices and judgements; money acquires cultural value through its association with them. The Gulf’s investment in museums, fairs and international brands can be understood in these terms. Tourism and property development may yield financial returns, while institutional prestige brings recognition and access to influential networks.

There are consequences for the city itself. Sharon Zukin’s concept of the “symbolic economy” describes how culture shapes urban development and the value assigned to places. A fair directs people towards certain buildings and neighbourhoods. Over time, such choices help determine which parts of a city are treated as its cultural centre, where investment goes and what residents are encouraged to value.

Futurism and the managed present

Doha lends itself to comparisons with science fiction. Across the Gulf, architectural renderings and masterplans have long supplied images of an imminent future. In Jörg Heiser’s discussion of “Gulf Futurism”, this imagery is connected to the experience of rapid change, consumerism and the loss of historical texture.¹

The term becomes less useful when it is reduced to a description of gleaming towers. Futurism can then reproduce the promotional imagery it was meant to question. Writing about the region too often moves between an inherited Orientalism and a technological version of the same fascination, leaving ordinary conditions of life out of view.

Those conditions include labour, the law and the regulation of public behaviour. They also determine what may be shown and discussed. A promised future offers little explanation of these arrangements, and can make them easier to overlook.

Art Basel Qatar’s format was part of its appeal. Each gallery presented one artist, with the common theme intended to give the event coherence and allow more sustained attention to individual practices.² Coverage described a fair distributed through Msheireb’s civic and gallery spaces, rather than contained in a single exhibition hall.³

The arrangement matters because fairs have considerable influence over what gets seen. Over the past two decades, they have helped decide which artists circulate internationally and which kinds of work become familiar to collectors and institutions. A solo-presentation format concentrates attention and gives the curatorial framework greater weight.

It also makes a claim for the event’s seriousness. Visitors are invited to approach it as an exhibition, with an expectation of sustained looking and public engagement. For regional audiences who have travelled abroad to encounter major international artists, having that work presented locally, alongside regional practices, changes the terms of access. It gives Doha a stronger claim to a place in the art world’s geography.

Representation and re-centring

Accounts of the inaugural edition described regional artists receiving space and attention comparable to those given to international names.³ That is a more substantial proposition than the occasional regional inclusion in an otherwise Western programme. It raises the possibility that recognition might increasingly be established within the region itself.

Arjun Appadurai’s writing on global cultural flows describes the uneven circulation of images, capital and recognition. The fair can be understood as an attempt to alter those routes, giving MENASA greater weight as a site of cultural production. Whether it succeeds will depend on what happens between editions: acquisitions, education, institutional relationships and the room available for critical debate.

Joseph Nye’s “soft power” remains a familiar explanation for cultural investment. The emphasis is on attraction and the influence it can secure. The Gulf’s ambitions also suggest a form of systems power: the ability to bring competing interests together, broker relationships and maintain them.

Heiser connects Art Basel Qatar to the country’s diplomatic position and its cultivation of a role as intermediary.¹ A fair gives this role another setting. Collectors, political figures and institutional leaders meet at previews and dinners, through studio visits and on museum boards. Such encounters can make relationships familiar and acceptable without the explicit declarations of formal diplomacy. “Artwashing” describes part of the problem, but says less about these routine exchanges and the interests they bring together.

The fair’s curatorial ambitions have to be considered alongside its restrictions. A one-artist-per-gallery format leaves each selection particularly exposed: the chosen artist carries the gallery’s entire presentation. Legal and moral constraints may therefore encourage caution before the work reaches the fair.¹

The resulting balance can be carefully managed. Established Western names sit alongside artists from the Arab world and West Asia, demonstrating international range without necessarily testing the limits of what is permitted. Political work may be present, yet its treatment of trauma or conflict can remain selective and closely framed.

Major cultural events elsewhere also negotiate the demands of powerful sponsors. In more tightly governed settings, however, the consequences of those negotiations are harder to separate from curatorial decisions.

Reading the works

The works highlighted in coverage suggest several ways in which artists approached these conditions. Textiles, garments and organic materials carry forms of memory that remain attached to everyday use. Heritage is handled as something still being worked on, altered and passed between people.

Elsewhere, ritual, uniforms and spectacle turn nationalism into a kind of choreography, often viewed through the experience of diaspora. Other works trace militarism in domestic space and everyday design. Surveillance and repetition provide ways of recording conflict over time, resisting its reduction to a single image.

These concerns sit comfortably within Becoming. They allow for politically attentive work and reflection on historical change within an institutional setting. That fit is worth examining. The works can sustain serious questions while remaining acceptable to an international fair and to a city that has made culture part of its public identity. The issue is how much of their critical force survives those conditions of presentation.

Detail of Marwan Kassab-Bachi, Kopf (Head), 1977. Oil on canvas, 195 × 128 cm. Presented by Sfeir-Semler Gallery at Art Basel Qatar, Doha, 2026. Photo by Lana Stalnaya. — Detail of Marwan Kassab-Bachi, *Kopf (Head)*, 1977. Oil on canvas, 195 × 128 cm. Presented by Sfeir-Semler Gallery at Art Basel Qatar, Doha, 2026. Photo by Lana Stalnaya.

What future art history might make of this

Future accounts of this period may give considerable weight to the institutions through which art circulated: mega-events, expanding cultural franchises and a market increasingly bound up with geopolitical interests. The prominence of particular practices will need to be understood in relation to those arrangements. What looks like a dominant aesthetic can lose its authority when the structures supporting it change.

Some work may come to seem “machine-compatible”, readily adapted to the requirements of fairs, museums and global branding. Practices that resisted those requirements could acquire greater importance in retrospect, including work that was difficult to exhibit or commercially inconvenient. Neither outcome is assured, but the distinction is worth keeping open.

Art Basel Qatar offers a case through which to examine these questions. Its inaugural edition brought an exhibition-like fair into a programme of urban development and diplomatic positioning. Its longer significance will depend partly on the cultural life that develops around it, and on whether that life has room for work and arguments that do not serve the programme quite so well.