Art Basel Qatar
Two installations, one month. Engineering the concepts of Rayyane Tabet and Sumayya Vally.
BackTwo installations, one month. Engineering the concepts of Rayyane Tabet and Sumayya Vally.
BackArt Basel is the reference point of the international art market — the fair other fairs are measured against. Its inaugural Qatar edition placed a public program across Msheireb Downtown Doha. The work had to meet that standard, in public, on the opening of a fair the region had been waiting for.
An artist's concept is an intention before it is a structure. Our work begins where that intention meets material, load, wind, and a fixed opening date. For both commissions, we took the design and resolved what it would take to stand: geometry, structural engineering, material specification, fabrication, and on-site installation — without compromising the form the artist had drawn.
Tabet's pavilion is two intersecting circular structures, each 10 meters across and 7.5 meters high, overlapping into a single sheltered interior. One ring is clad in natural palm fronds, sourced from date farms around Doha; the other in artificial fronds — a tactile dialogue between the grown and the manufactured. We engineered the structure to carry the Gulf winter wind at full density, refusing the easy answer of thinning the cladding.
Vally's installation is a majlis reimagined as a continuously shifting form. It was built to be moved: a field of modular seating elements that visitors reconfigured throughout the fair. Every movable element had to carry people, take constant rearrangement, and hold its finish through a week of open-air use.
Both works stood for the opening, as designed. The inaugural Art Basel Qatar opened with both installations in place — concepts that had existed only as drawings a month earlier, now standing in public at the debut of the most demanding fair in the art world. When the first edition has to be right, there is no second attempt.