DOHA.- For the 2026 inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar, François Ghebaly and Lodovico Corsini will present Meriem Bennani's landmark kinetic sculpture, Windy.

Standing over two meters tall, Windy is a spinning tornado that captures the energy and dynamism of the metropolis, drawing directly from the material landscape of crowded urban streets and sidewalks. In dialogue with recent large-scale immersive installations at Fondazione Prada, Lafayette Anticipations, and the upcoming debut exhibition at the expanded New Museum in New York, Windy, Bennani’s first public sculpture, uniquely transposes the artist's signature approach to moving image into sculptural form.

For over a decade, Moroccan artist Meriem Bennani has developed a shape-shifting practice that contemplates matters of community, movement, and fractured identity in contemporary society. Juxtaposing genres like reality TV, documentary filmmaking, science fiction, and cinéma vérité, she explores the potential of storytelling while shedding light on global power structures. Bennani's groundbreaking video installations and sculptures are informed by the circulation of global cultures online and frequently rooted in the specifics of Moroccan life and postcolonial history. Her work speaks to the hybrid nature of contemporary cultural flows, blending humor and critique while reaffirming the power of family and home against larger systems of power across a networked world. Exaggerating media tropes in what Bennani describes as a "hyperactivity of genre," her works reflect the disjointed state of contemporary mediation through strategies of immersion, duplication, multiplicity, hyperbole, and remix.

Produced in collaboration with High Line Art and Audemars Piguet Contemporary, Windy is a larger-than-life installation that breaks the norms of traditional public sculpture. Electric bike motors, industrial foam, and other materials nod to the metropolitan environment and animate the work. Like all of Bennani's sculptures, Windy retains the artist's signature blend of absurdist playfulness, pastiche of cultural clichés, and interest in animation, while demonstrating her mastery of mechanical techniques to create the impression of a cartoon-like tornado escaping from its animated environment—a portal between 2D and 3D worlds. The work expands upon her practice of creating large, mixed-media sculptures incorporating gyrating animatronics, which she has thus far used to host her video artworks. Here, Windy exists on its own terms, transposing the artist's approach to animation, video, and movement into physical presence and suggesting that elements of the worlds we construct onscreen may crop up in our own landscape.