Basel – Switzerland
A look back at the Basel contemporary art fair, held from June 12th to 18th, in anticipation of Paris +Art Basel from October 18th to 22nd.
Two hundred and eighty-four galleries, over 4,000 artists from five continents, 82,000 visitors, a Rothko offered for $60 million 1 … the figures for the world’s biggest Contemporary Art Fair (“the world’s most important art event”, according to its director Noah Horowitz) are enough to make you dizzy. Here’s a small selection from the 76 large-scale installations and performances on offer in the Unlimited sector, showcasing the most contemporary creation.
Seen this winter at the Continua Gallery in Paris’s Marais District (see Acumen # 28), the latest video by Franco-Algerian artist Adel Abdessemed set the tone for this 2nd post-Covid edition, divided between effervescence and restraint. Shown on a 12-metre-long screen prominently positioned in the main hall of the Unlimited Space reserved for very large-format works, the film caused quite a stir. An allegory of the end of a world – our world in perdition? It borrows its title, Jam Proximus Ardet, from Virgil’s Aeneid (when the hero realises that the city of Troy is in flames) and presents us with the image of the sea and a burning ship slowly approaching, while we discover the artist standing at its prow, arms crossed impassively… Unbearable impassivity condemning all indifference in the face of the sea of tragedies that the Mediterranean has become?
APOCALYPSES
Sea Never Dries, proclaimed Ghanaian artist Serge Attukwei Clottey, with a huge suspended wave made of fragments of yellow plastic water containers. A work both dazzling and chilling, like the installation by Chinese artist He Xiangyu entitled Inherited Wounds: three rows of graffitied wooden school chairs lined up in front of their miniature reproduction. Guilt, anger, unease… no one could pass by with a light heart. A strange sense of embarrassment, mixed with curiosity and a little forced amusement, were also felt by visitors invited to lie down on the leather and metal hammocks suspended by chains by Italian artist Monica Bonvicini (presented by Peter Kilchmann Gallery). Entitled Never Again, this pseudo-rest area with SM overtones upsets behavioural conventions and traps visitors in their own contradictions.
Photo: Dawn Blackman
This research can be compared with the video installation How Did He Die by Diamond Stingily (b. 1990, Chicago, represented by Isabella Bortolozzi). By placing a grid in front of the projection screen showing young girls in a school playground, Diamond Stingily encloses the viewer’s gaze to make the confinement of the filmed community more pronounced…
WANDERINGS
Anne Imhof’s Jester is another video installation designed to shake up our senses and our shackles.
(Galerie Buchholz and Sprüth Magers) was one of the attractions at Basel Unlimited. Composed from several performances filmed during her exhibition Natures mortes en 2021 at the Palais de Tokyo, this hour-long video piece projected onto a double screen can appear as a kind of dream or illusion. The dancers and performers move in a twilight atmosphere, sometimes violently, sometimes in slow motion, following the intensity of the music and sometimes emitting inaudible cries… A jolting choreography evoking wandering and chaos. Is it not on the ruins that we build a new world?
- Painting presented by Acquavella Gallery, New York
Stéphanie Dulout
Messeplatz 10, Bâle (Suisse)