The Best Booths at Art Basel Qata

New York’s Gray gallery has built its presentation around a single work: Nia (2026), a monumental sculpture by Torkwase Dyson made from steel, graphite, paint, and wood. The scale is tremendous. Composed of two identicall notched semi circles, the work stretches horizontally and vertically, with sweeping arcs broken by sharp structural openings.

The sculpture is part of Dyson’s “Memory Horizon” series, and it behaves less like an object than an environment. You’re meant to move alongside it, noticing how curved planes open into tighter vertical spaces. The materials matter. The graphite coating dulls the surface just enough to absorb light rather than reflect it, keeping the work grounded even at its largest moments.

Dyson has described Nia—a word that translates to “purpose” in Swahili—as a meditation on thresholds. That idea comes through without explanation. In Doha, where the fair itself is testing what it means to build an art market before one fully exists, the work’s emphasis on movement, access, and space feels apt.

Luxembourg & Co. is presenting a selection of sculpture-paintings by Katsumi Nakai, a Japanese artist whose work centers on an unlikely obsession: hinges. Born in 1927 in Hirakata, Japan, Nakai came of age during the Second World War and began traveling extensively afterward, eventually settling in Milan in 1964, where he would spend the most productive decades of his career.

What you see in the booth are wooden panels that have been cut, assembled, and reassembled using hinges, allowing the works to open, fold, and shift in real space. These are not paintings that stay put. They articulate themselves through movement, even when static. Panels tilt forward or recede, creating shadows and interruptions that change as you walk past them.

Nakai developed this approach in the mid-1960s, after moving away from expressive abstraction and toward a language built around literal openness. Hinges became his way of thinking through structure, possibility, and transformation. In Milan, he was associated with artists connected to Galleria del Naviglio, including Enrico Castellani and Lucio Fontana, but his work never fully aligned with any single movement. The effect is as fun as it is rigorous.

Fergus McCaffrey’s booth centers on Shigeko Kubota’s Duchampiana: Video Chess (1968–1975), a video sculpture that grew out of Kubota’s documentation of Reunion, the 1968 performance in which Marcel Duchamp and John Cage played a game of chess on an electronic board designed by Lowell Cross.

The work is straightforward to describe and strange to experience. A video monitor is positioned below a transparent glass chessboard with clear chess pieces. On the screen, Kubota’s manipulated photographic slides—drawn from her documentation of the event—cycle through images of Duchamp and Cage, accompanied by the original live soundtrack composed by Cage. As the chess game progressed during the performance, each move triggered different sound compositions distributed across speakers surrounding the audience.

Kubota spent years reworking this material, colorizing and animating photographs and eventually turning the documentation into a sculptural system. What makes the piece compelling in a fair context is how tactile it feels. This is video art you encounter physically. You look down at it. You hear it before you fully see it. In a fair where screens are mostly absent, Video Chess feels less like an artifact of media history than a reminder that video can still hold a room. Add to the large scale photos of Cage and Duchamp playing chess and you could spend hours at the booth.

Tabari Artspace’s booth is dedicated to Hazem Harb, a Palestinian artist whose work brings collage and installation together through an ongoing engagement with archaeology, mapping, and displacement. The presentation draws from works made between 2018 and the present, allowing different moments in Harb’s practice to speak to one another rather than forcing a single narrative.

Several works come from “Reformulated Archaeology” (2018), in which Harb layers fragments of landscapes, anatomical forms, and images of Neolithic figurines sourced from across Palestine. Stripped of color and removed from their original contexts, these elements are recomposed into dense fields that echo the way artifacts circulate through Western museum systems: extracted, catalogued, and displayed far from where they originated. Torsos and faces recur, encircled by thorn-like forms that suggest containment rather than preservation.

The Dubai-based gallery has also brought Victims of a Map (2025), in which Harb reassembles historical maps into abstract figural shapes. Names of erased villages are inscribed onto transparent glass, allowing text and image to overlap and slip out of alignment. Mapping appears here not as neutral record-keeping, but as an active instrument of disappearance.

At the center is And In-Between (2024), a sculptural installation made from enlarged 3D-printed keys replicating the key to Harb’s family home in Gaza and the key to his own apartment, both destroyed. Through repetition, the key represents displacement as ongoing rather than historical or symbolic.

Dubai’s Green Art Gallery presents a series of new paintings by Maryam Hoseini that unfold across three or four painted wood panels each. Rather than functioning as discrete images, the panels form continuous fields that stretch across the wall, with bodies and landscapes appearing, fragmenting, and reappearing as your eye moves from one section to the next.

Figures never resolve into a single form. Limbs repeat. Architectural elements press in. Landscapes drift in and out of focus. Orientation shifts from horizontal to vertical across panels, creating a sense of duration rather than direction. There’s a quietly erotic quality to the works. They seem abstract from far away but up close there’s … more. 

Hoseini’s work builds on her recent exhibition “Swells” at the gallery, but here the emphasis is on how images accumulate meaning through delay. Each panel acts as a pause point, allowing the composition to recalibrate before continuing. Bodies function both as figures and as structural elements, held within patterned surfaces that feel simultaneously sensual and restrictive.

Lawrie Shabibi’s booth is devoted to a presentation of work by Amir Nour, the Sudanese-American sculptor whose career unfolded largely outside the usual Western narratives of postwar modernism. The booth brings together sculpture and works on paper spanning several decades, offering a clear introduction to an artist whose work is spare in form but dense in reference.

At the center is Serpent (1970), an early steel sculpture composed of 34 quarter-circular pipes arranged into a low, undulating form. Precisely constructed from industrial materials, the piece reads differently as you move around it, shifting from something architectural to a tool or a vessel. Nearby are two bronze sculptures, Doll (1974) and One and One (1976), which compress figurative and functional references into rounded, interlocking forms. Both draw loosely from everyday objects rooted in Nour’s early environment, including calabashes and the Sudanese jabannah, a traditional coffee or water dispenser.

The booth also includes a small group of lithographs from the 1960s, made during Nour’s formative years studying in London. In works like Confessions, traces of Diwani script appear as marks rather than readable text, emphasizing rhythm and surface over language. Together, the selection makes a straightforward case for Nour as an artist working in parallel with Minimalism rather than inside it. The work is direct, materially grounded, and unforced, which makes it sit comfortably within the fair’s quieter, more deliberate format.