Conversations at Art Basel 2023: Care, Collectivity, and Connectivity Explored by Leading Cultural Figures in Panels
A contemporary art fair in Switzerland
Since 1970, when it was created by Swiss gallerists Ernst Beyeler, Trudl Bruckner and Balz Hilt, Art Basel stages every year a series of international contemporary art fairs in Basel, Miami Beach, Hong Kong and Paris. This year, the Basel edition of the show is open to the general public from 15 to 18 June at the Swiss exhibition site Messe Basel, featuring a hall designed by local architectural practice Herzog & de Meuron.
The fair features two hundred and eighty-two galleries and over four thousand artists from five continents, divided into different projects. Concurrently, a series of exhibitions take place in and around Basel in order to create a region-wide art week.
Unlimited at Art Basel
In particular, Unlimited is Art Basel’s sector dedicated to large-scale projects. It features installations, sculptures, wall paintings, comprehensive photo series, and video projections.
The project is curated by Giovanni Carmine, director of Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen. «Unlimited serves as a space for art to unfold in its inherent power and societal significance. It is truly inspiring to witness galleries and artists embracing the potential of this platform. A space where new and context-specific productions are presented. In addition to names like Barbara Kruger, Bruce Nauman, or Christian Marclay, visitors will also have the opportunity to encounter lesser-known artists such as Yuki Kimura or Firelei Báez, whose contributions captivate with their poetic precision. With Unlimited in mind, we look forward to the discussions sparked by the interaction between artworks and the public».
Seventy-six projects: Unlimited
With seventy-six projects, Unlimited offers food for thought on various topical issues. Among these are colonial heritage, gender equality and environmental issues. Firstly, Dominican artist Firelei Báez reimagines the archaeological ruins of the San-Souci Palace in northern Haiti as a reflection on the Caribbean’s historical significance in narratives of migration, revolution, and survival.
Then, American artist Diamond Stingily’s work consists in a single channel projection of footage showing young Black girls playing, whom the viewer looks at from behind a chain-link fence installed in front of the wall displaying the film, which becomes a symbol of cultural, structural, and chronological distance.
Moreover, Austrian artist Martha Jungwirth painted a nine-meter-long triptych depicting figures inspired by animals that have perished in environmental disasters. Italian artist Monica Bonvicini shows a collection of swings composed from steel pipes, black leather, belts, and chains, suspended from a steel structure. The work incorporates research on psychoanalysis, sexuality, labor, feminism, and architecture, addressing the way space dictates behavior.
Kabinett, the concept of the cabinet of curiosities
Last addition to Art Basel, Kabinett is a sector dedicated to curated and thematic presentations. It debuts this year with thirteen presentations from fourteen galleries. Vincenzo de Bellis, Director, Fairs and Exhibition Platforms of Art Basel, declares: «We are particularly excited to introduce Kabinett to our Basel show for the first time, offering visitors the opportunity to dive deeper into an artist’s practice through focused solo and thematic presentations within galleries’ booths».
Topography is the inspiration behind Untitled (Map / Species). There, Albanian artist Anri Sala reworks maps of geopolitical territories through manual manipulation to fit within the boundaries of etchings of biological species. A survey of life under the specter of AIDS is the subject of American painter Hugh Steers’ allegorical depictions of the tenor of New York in the late Eighties and early Nineties.
Building on the concept of a cabinet of curiosities as a room containing a small universe, works by Colombian artists Débora Arango, Feliza Bursztyn, Beatriz González, Luz Lizarazo, Luis Roldán, and Icaro Zorbar question the notions of art, mysticism, feminine, female body, transcendence, sustainability, human relationships, and the act of seeing.
Finally, nature with its daily miracles is at the center of Swedish artist Henrik Håkansson’s Untitled Swarm (Sturnus vulgaris) #3, a mobile-style sculpture that creates a dialogue between the artist’s newly created paintings and Alexander Calder’s works.
Parcours at Art Basel
Curated by Samuel Leuenberger, Parcours consists of a series of site-specific projects and performances scattered around Basel city center and freely open to the public. This year, it features twenty-four works under the title Word of Mouth, which reflect on the current state of artmaking as a means of expression that translates social and political communication.
Parcours is curated by Samuel Leuenberger, founder of the non-profit exhibition spaces SALTS in Birsfelden and Country SALTS in Bennwil: «From using the language of sculpture to convey a message to exploring the sonic textures of polyphony in immersive installations, this edition explores how artists have used both traditional and experimental modes of communication to better understand how we connect across dispersed geographies, durations, and contexts. Visitors will see some of the city’s most unusual and best-kept secrets opened through an array of artistic projects, with locations including libraries, private meeting rooms in financial institutions, domestic gardens, underground tunnels, bars, and even traffic roundabouts».
Basel Department of Transportation headquarters hosts a selection of wall carpets by Israeli artist Noa Eshkol, set in dialogue with dance compositions she developed in the mid and late Twentieth century. The Kunstmuseum Basel features two projects: Controlled Burn and Shhh!. The former is a drone film taking viewers on a cosmic voyage through a landscape of pyrotechnics, coal mines, oil rigs, and rusting power plants. The latter consists in a series of paintings depicting mythical hybrids of half human and half goat, governed by the fetish of exhibitionism, as well as the consumption and destruction of knowledge.
Also, the Museum der Kulturen showcases a presentation by American artist Jacolby Satterwhite, who explores themes of faith, mythology, rehabilitation, and spiritual acceptance through two video installations, a virtual reality work, and a painting.
Messeplatz at Art Basel
During Art Basel the city’s Messeplatz always displays some public art. This year it features a site-specific presentation by French-Moroccan artist Latifa Echakhch, currently based in Switzerland. Also curated by Samuel Leuenberger, the presentation consists in a sprawling superstructure, which serves as backdrop for a series of live concerts and performances organized in collaboration with Luc Meier, Director of La Becque Artist Residency.
Latifa Echakhch has a tradition of working with deconstructed stages, aiming at uncovering the possibilities and hopes enclosed within them.
The musical mean to interrogate the fundamentals of sound and music-making as a shared experience between the artist and the audience. Beyond the performances, the various islands and stage settings are available for the public to sing, recite poetry, share knowledge, or rest.
Film displayed at Art Basel
Art Basel features a project dedicated to cinema curated by Filipa Ramos – Portuguese founder of the online video platform Vdrome and lecturer at the Arts Institute of the FHNW in Basel – in collaboration with Marian Masone, New York-based independent curator. Located in Stadtkino Basel, Film lasts six days and is free to the public.
The showcase begins on Monday 12, with Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and Bloodshed, focusing on the life, work, and activism of artist Nan Goldin and her efforts to hold Purdue Pharma, accountable for the opioid epidemic within the United States, while exposing its owners’ patronage of prominent cultural institutions.
Then, the next day is dedicated to the 2023 Venice Biennale Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement Winner Simone Forti, with the survey Simone Forti Dances the News, which displays how Forti visually expressed the world news through choreography from the 1980s to present, showcasing the artist’s coalescence of dance, performance, drawing, and sculpture.
Another artist featured in the project is David Hammons, whose career is narrated in ‘The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons’, a film by Judd Tully and Harold Crooks. Besides, Film also features social and historical themes, as in the case of Welcome Visitors! by Penny Siopis, where home-movie footage, music and text are combined to reveal how the personal, political, and social spheres entangle in the history of South Africa, signed by colonialism, apartheid, migration and globalization.
Conversations at Art Basel
Curated by Emily Butler, Conversations brings together a selection of contemporary cultural figures, making them dialogue on key topics of art and culture. The 2023 edition centers on the subjects of care, collectivity, and connectivity and features panels focusing on artist-led spaces on the African continent, parenthood in the arts, inclusive architecture of museums in the future, and the ethical and artistic implications of artificial intelligence and blockchain technology.
The speakers include British artist and curator Lubaina Himid, South African artist and independent curator Khanyisile Mbongwa, Indian gallerist Amrita Jhaveri, Irish economist Dr Clare McAndrew, Black Austrian artist
Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, French legal scholar, Internet activist and artist Primavera De Filippi, Swiss curator and critic Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ghanian curator and critic Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, Thai architect, designer and artist Kulapat Yantrasast, and many more.
Art Basel
Art Basel is a modern and contemporary art fair that takes place annually since 1970 in Basel, Switzerland. The 2023 edition is open to the public from 15 to 18 June at the Swiss exhibition site Messe Basel. Concurrently, a series of exhibitions take place in and around Basel during the whole week.
