As it approaches its 55th edition, Art Basel is preparing a vintage where embroidery rubs shoulders with algorithms and where figures long relegated to the margins are brought back into the spotlight
From June 16 to 21, Messe Basel reopens its halls for what remains the most closely watched event on the contemporary art calendar. The major new feature can be summed up in two numbers: Zero 10, the section dedicated to practices shaped by digital culture, is making its Basel debut. Co-curated by Trevor Paglen and strategist Eli Scheinman, it brings together some twenty exhibitors around a deliberately broad theme. The Condition, which questions what seeing and knowing mean in a world saturated with generated imagery. Green Screen Hito Steyerl's (2023), an LED wall built from recycled bottles and inhabited by living plants whose bioelectric signals modulate the image, will undoubtedly be the most discussed work. More discreetly, the presence of Vera Molnár, a French pioneer of algorithmic art who passed away in 2023 and to whom the Kunstmuseum Basel is simultaneously dedicating a retrospective of her engravings, serves as a reminder that digital art has a long history, older than the trend attributed to it.
The other major theme of this edition lies in a movement observed for several seasons and which this year seems to have become undeniably clear: the reintroduction of female figures long relegated to the margins of the established art world. At Marianne Boesky's gallery, Mary Lovelace O'Neal, the great African-American painter whose work cascades in deep purples and sandy oranges, is presented with a force that makes it difficult to understand why she has been so long absent from European museums. At Pace's gallery, the verticality of Louise Nevelson and the restraint of Agnes Martin engage in a dialogue, two generations of American female abstraction that the fair is bringing back into circulation without heavy-handed didacticism. And Yto Barrada, who will represent France at the Venice Biennale a few months later, presents black silk quilts where the geometry of the arabesque resonates with Maghrebi textile heritage.
Thread, in fact, runs through this edition like a basso continuo. Ghada Amer, at Boesky, has been using it as the very substance of her painting for thirty years: in her latest canvases, hundreds of colored threads fall in a vertical cascade, revealing almost illegible feminist phrases, as if held beneath the surface. Sanford Biggers reinterprets antique American quilts, creating sculptural constructions edged with gold leaf. Marilou Schultz, a Navajo artist recently joined by Jessica Silverman and concurrently exhibited at the Tinguely Museum in Labouring Bodies, unfolds a tapestry that extends this logic: what has long been called craftsmanship finally finds its rightful place.
There remains the Unlimited section, where the fair allows works too large for the booths. This year, two installations are presented in dialogue there: two sides that hold truthA twelve-meter freestanding wall by Woody De Othello, co-presented by Karma and Jessica Silverman, whose niches house some fifty sculptures in ceramic, glass, stone, and redwood; and the somber architecture of Torkwase Dyson at Pace and GRAY, inspired by the Great Migration, made of trapezoids in steel, glass, and aluminum. Two African-American artists who, each in their own way, use materials as a space for reflection on flight, waiting, and memory.
This is perhaps what this edition of Art Basel will most clearly signify: not the confirmation of a market, but the moment when several long-minority lines (textiles, women, diasporas, computational practices) cease to be exhibition complements to become the main narrative.
Eve Kaplan
