For the art market, there’s a lot riding on the small but rich nation of Qatar. Despite significant instability in the wider Middle East, the latest drive from an otherwise depressed sector intensifies next week with the launch of the venerable Art Basel fair in Doha (February 5-7).
“I’m naturally drawn to the parts of the art world that are still forming. Other places and ideas are becoming a bit ossified,” finds the gallerist Niru Ratnam, who compares the Gulf region’s high energy levels around culture to London’s in the early 2000s.
For his first Art Basel showing, Ratnam brings to Qatar a 22-screen video work by the Turkey-born artist Kutluğ Ataman (“Mesopotamian Dramaturgies / The Stream”, 2022, £180,000), and expects “a core of Middle East curators and collectors. Plus, because it is Art Basel, some more international people, certainly more than in my small Soho gallery.”
The avant-garde work, which charts Ataman’s 10-year career break to run his family’s livestock farm in Anatolia, will sit alongside solo booths of safer, more traditional works, including heavy hitters Pablo Picasso (Van de Weghe gallery), Jean-Michel Basquiat (Acquavella) and Philip Guston, including his late, cigarette-filled self-portrait, “Conversation” (1978), priced at $14mn (Hauser & Wirth).
Some gallerists have privately voiced concerns over the regime’s rules against same-sex activity, illegal in Qatar, and its workers’ rights record, for which it was criticised during its 2022 hosting of the football World Cup. Issues of self-censorship, at least, seem inevitable, though exhibitors say that Art Basel has not issued any advice on what they should or shouldn’t bring. Their gallery selection process is, however, based on project proposals received in advance.
Ratnam says that “in recent times, I’ve thought more about [censorship] when entering the US [he showed at New York’s Independent and Armory fairs] and that I might get stopped at immigration” — he was born in Sri Lanka and has Tamil heritage. “I had my lawyer’s number on my phone,” he says. Wael Shawky, the artist who is director of the first Art Basel Qatar, recently told Cultured magazine that “There is a culture, and it’s normal that we respect the culture . . . What I see here in Qatar, now, is much more generous than what I see in many places in the world today.”
