Raqib Shaw and “Echoes Over Arabia,” Your First Look Ahead of Art Basel Qatar

As Art Basel Qatar approaches, Raqib Shaw’s “Echoes Over Arabia” emerges as one of the fair’s most quietly focused presentations. Shown by Thaddaeus Ropac at Booth M113 (February 5–7), the group brings together a cycle of nocturnal paintings and layered works on paper that unfold with measured intensity amid the fair’s pace. Rather than addressing Arabia as a site to be depicted, the presentation operates through atmosphere, duration, and attention—foregrounding experience over description. “Arabia entered my imagination long before it entered my thinking as a place,” Raqib Shaw reflects, describing a geography formed through scripture, oral transmission, and distance rather than direct encounter.

Born in Calcutta, raised in Kashmir, and now based in London, Raqib Shaw draws multiple cultural and spiritual lineages into careful alignment. Across these works, histories of unrest, repetition, and human ambition are present but never declared. Informed by the ethos of Kashmiri Sufism—its emphasis on love, beauty, and inward attention—the paintings sustain composure even as they register fracture and loss. Firelight and moonlight regulate tempo rather than drama; unrest is absorbed into structure. As Shaw notes, light does not consume but reveals.

Formally, the works echo the ornamentation and intricate borders of sacred Islamic manuscripts while withholding calligraphy, allowing visual language to operate without textual authority. Eroded margins, burn marks, and insect passages introduce interruption and instability, turning ornament into a contested threshold—a zone where order strains to hold and buried material begins to surface. “Echoes Over Arabia” by Raqib Shaw unfolds not as a sequence to be read, but as a state to be entered—“what we inherit, what we bury, and what insists on returning in the form of light.”

Ahead of the fair in Doha, Whitewall spoke with Raqib Shaw about the conditions that shaped this body of work, the role of memory and shadow in his process, and why painting—slow, inward, and resistant to immediacy—continues to function as a space for reflection and endurance.

Raqib Shaw and the Quiet Weight of Memory

WHITEWALL: “Echoes Over Arabia” approaches Arabia less as a fixed geography than as a psychological and symbolic landscape shaped by memory, spirituality, and projection. At what point did Arabia become, for you, an inner terrain rather than a literal place—and how did that understanding shape the emotional and formal direction of this body of work?

RAQIB SHAW: Arabia entered my imagination long before it entered my thinking as a place. Coming from an Islamic background, the formative stage of the religion is set in Arabia, and as a child that inevitably conjured visions shaped not by geography but by scripture, oral transmission, and interior projection. The Arabia encountered through the Quran is expansive and symbolic rather than descriptive. Everyone carries their own vision of it. Mine was distant, almost romanticised, formed through reading, listening, and imagining rather than seeing.

That inward Arabia later found a quiet correspondence with my childhood in Kashmir. Nights there were dense with stories—spoken in fragments, inhabited by spirits, migrations, and unspoken histories. Meaning gathered after dark. Day belonged to explanation; night belonged to resonance. Over time, these two internal geographies—scriptural Arabia and nocturnal Kashmir—merged into something less locational and more psychological. “Echoes Over Arabia” emerges from that convergence. The works do not describe a place; they inhabit a mental climate shaped by memory, belief, distance, and projection. Formally, this allowed geography to dissolve into atmosphere, and emotion to determine structure rather than narrative sequence.

“The works do not describe a place; they inhabit a mental climate shaped by memory, belief, distance, and projection.”

—Raqib Shaw

WW: The intricate borders in these works recall the ornamentation of sacred manuscripts, yet they do not frame a linear narrative. Instead, they seem to function as thresholds between inner life and the outer world. How do you think about ornament today—as containment, resistance, or passage—and how has your relationship to ornament shifted over the course of your practice?

RS: I have never approached ornament as embellishment. From the outset, it functioned for me as a psychological and political device—a way of organising authority, regulating vision, and disciplining excess. My first sustained engagement with marginalia took place during The Power of the Ornament” exhibition at the Belvedere in Vienna in 2009, where ornament revealed “itself not as decoration, but as a mechanism through which power stabilises itself under the guise of beauty and order.

In “Echoes Over Arabia,” the borders draw on the visual language of sacred manuscripts, yet they refuse their traditional role of containment. They are eroded, infiltrated, punctured. Insects traverse them. Fire breaches them. Rather than enclosing meaning, ornament becomes a contested threshold—a fragile perimeter where order strains to hold and where what has been marginalised, buried, or suppressed begins to surface. Over time, my relationship to ornament has sharpened into an understanding of it as both psychological defence and political ploy: the last zone where authority attempts to regulate imagination, even as unconscious, historical, and ethical pressures continue to press through.

WW: Your formative years in Kashmir and your engagement with Kashmiri Sufism—particularly its emphasis on transcendence through love, beauty, and inner reflection—feel deeply embedded in these works. When the paintings also address conquest, destruction, and societal turmoil, how do you sustain a spiritual undercurrent without it becoming escapist? What does spiritual endurance look like to you in visual terms?

RS: I move through the world as both participant and witness—engaged in life, yet inwardly detached enough to observe its repetitions. The paintings emerge from this position. They register the damage caused by humanity’s recurring fixation on power, conquest, and dominance, but they do so obliquely, without accusation or declaration. I am not interested in illustration or proclamation; I am interested in how these forces imprint themselves on the psyche.

This is where spirituality enters the work—not as escape, but as endurance. Kashmiri Sufism taught me that love, beauty, and inward attention are not retreats from disorder, but ways of remaining human within it. Visually, this endurance appears as restraint. Fire does not consume; it reveals. Light does not dramatise; it concentrates attention. The figures remain absorbed rather than heroic. The works acknowledge unrest while refusing spectacle, sustaining a spiritual undercurrent that witnesses power’s corrosion without replicating its violence.

“I move through the world as both participant and witness—engaged in life, yet inwardly detached enough to observe its repetitions.”

—Raqib Shaw

Night, Memory, and the Shadow Self

WW: Ideas drawn from Carl Gustav Jung, especially the notion of the shadow, appear not only symbolically but materially in these works through perforations, burn marks, and eroded surfaces. You have spoken of memory as something that insists on returning. Do you experience these material ruptures as acts of excavation, confession, or transformation—and how much of that process unfolds consciously versus intuitively while you are working?

RS: Material rupture, the shadow, and unconscious emergence returning. The perforations, burn marks, and eroded surfaces in these works are not symbolic gestures applied after the fact; they arise from a state of working in which logic recedes. Much of the painting process unfolds in a space beyond conscious planning—a place without narrative sequencing—where one becomes an instrument rather than an author.

In those moments, the work feels less made than received. I am not illustrating ideas; I am aligning myself with an energy field and allowing form to surface through that alignment. Fire, insects, and erosion act as unconscious agents rather than tools. What appears as rupture often becomes access. The process is neither confession nor control; it is transformation through surrender.

WW: You have described this series as a reimagining of the Orientalist night from within, drawing on the contemplative chiaroscuro of Rembrandt, the devotional stillness of Zurbarán, and the dramatic intensity of Delacroix. What does it mean, for you, to inhabit the night rather than depict it—and how does light operate psychologically in these works, beyond atmosphere or spectacle?

RS: To inhabit the night is to accept uncertainty as a working condition. Historically, the night belonged to orientation rather than spectacle—caravans travelled by stars, knowledge moved through memory, silence functioned as listening. That mentality has always felt natural to me.

In “Echoes Over Arabia,” light operates psychologically rather than atmospherically. Firelight and moonlight isolate, gather, and slow perception. They allow complexity to remain unresolved. Night is not the absence of clarity, but the presence of heightened attention. These works are made in that state, and they ask to be encountered there.

WW: This presentation was conceived specifically for Art Basel Qatar, a context shaped by deep historical resonance and rapid contemporary transformation. How did working toward Doha as a site of encounter influence your thinking around inheritance, memory, and cultural continuity—and what do you hope viewers carry with them after moving through “Echoes Over Arabia?”

RS: What I hope viewers carry with them is, first, the permission to slow down. The three paintings are structured around a single source of light, and that concentration asks for patience, stillness, and sustained looking. Light here is not theatrical but contemplative. It sets a tempo in which attention can settle rather than scatter. The works on paper, with their marginalia, operate differently but in parallel. They invite introspection, suggesting that without compassion for others and gratitude for what we hold, the world quickly becomes uninhabitable—tragic in its repetition of harm.

At the same time, these are paintings fully aware of their lineage. They exist in dialogue with the tradition of chiaroscuro, where light carries psychological and ethical weight rather than spectacle. This is the first time I have committed fully to a single light source across a group of works, marking a quiet development in my practice. The paintings do not seek novelty; they seek continuity. They speak to earlier paintings while insisting on the relevance of painting itself—as a slow, reflective medium capable of holding complexity, vulnerability, and care.