Art Basel Paris 2025 felt different this year. The fair’s usual choreography, blue-chip booths, familiar collectors and predictable headlines still hummed along, but beneath the surface there was a new visual rhythm that’s hard to ignore. It’s coming from Arab artists who are no longer content to be seen as “regional voices.” They’re speaking in a language that’s as sharp, conceptual, and globally relevant as anything that hung under the Grand Palais Éphémère’s glass roof. Their work doesn’t plead for understanding; it commands it. It’s not about representation anymore, it’s about authorship.
You felt that shift immediately with Lebanese painter Anas Albraehe, whose quietly hypnotic portraits of resting men pull you into stillness. In a fair that thrived on spectacle, his subdued palette, ochres, deep blues, soft violets became an act of defiance. His figures are vulnerable but not exposed; they rest, they don’t retreat. There’s a quiet power in choosing peace over performance.
At Balice Hertling, Simone Fattal presented paintings that merge ancient form with contemporary restraint. They suggest fragments of lost civilizations, or perhaps blueprints for new ones. His pieces carried a rare calm amid the fair’s sensory overload, a reminder that modern Arab art often moves with timeless poise.
Iraqi-American artist Vian Sora, showing with Bortolami, translated memory into motion. Her layered canvases, molten, fractured, rebuilt, mirror the way cities like Baghdad never really stop burning or rebuilding. They’re works of survival, yes, but also of style.
Myriam Haddad, the Syrian born artist based in Paris, showed canvases that were emotional maps of the subconscious. Figures blur into abstraction, like memories mid-fade. Her approach feels deeply European in training, yet unmistakably shaped by displacement, proof that identity today is no longer tied to geography but to movement.
Then came Zineb Sedira, whose installations at Galerie Mennour sit somewhere between cinema and archive. Sedira’s work has always resisted confinement, it’s political, poetic, and quietly autobiographical. This year, she blurred fact and fiction so fluidly you forgot which was which.
Samia Halaby, a legend among Arab modernists, continued to redefine what abstraction can hold. Her geometric rhythms feel timeless, formal yet deeply human. In her work, you see both discipline and emotion, each reinforcing the other. She’s the bridge between generations, and her presence grounded the fair’s younger, experimental energy.
Sarah Abu Abdallah, meanwhile, brought a digital sharpness to the mix. Her works feel like cultural mirrors part satire, part social commentary, reflecting how the Arab world navigates technology, womanhood, and self-representation.
In a more introspective corner, Hayfa Algwaiz and Sama Alshaibi explored femininity through image, body, and narrative. Algwaiz’s works are minimal, but her gaze is razor-sharp, her portraits reclaim softness as strength. Alshaibi, with her photo-video pieces, extended that dialogue into the terrain of migration and memory, reminding us that belonging is never static.
Together, these artists form a conversation that no longer fits inside the old art-world framework of “Arab representation”. Their practices stretch beyond identity politics, drawing from heritage, technology, and global visual culture with ease. It’s not about proving presence anymore, it’s about owning perspective.
At Art Basel Paris 2025, Arab art wasn’t on display. It was defining the temperature of contemporary art itself.
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