Ahead of Art Basel, the satellite fair Liste opened to VIPs on Monday. The fair has made the move to the Messe, in Hall 3, around the corner from the main fair in an aim to be more accessible.
Bringing together 88 exhibitors, the fair is a place to see work by emerging artists from galleries on the rise, primarily hailing from Europe.
Below a look at the best on view.
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Isaac Chong Wai at Blindspot Gallery
For a booth titled “Breath by Breath,” performance artist Isaac Chong Wai, who is based in Berlin and Hong Kong, presents two series of new works, alongside an older one, all of them related to the artist’s own breath.
In the 2015 video, titled Neue Wache, Chong stands facing a window that looks at the Neue Wache (New Guard house) in Berlin which, since its completion in 1818, has severed various purposes depending on the ruling party’s political agenda: a royal guard house until the end of World War I, a memorial to those who had died in Great War, the site of an annual parade during the Nazi regime, a memorial to the victims of Fascism and Militarism under the German Democratic Republic and, finally, since 1993, as a memorial to the victims of war and tyranny. As Chong faces the building, he breathes onto it, attempting to cover it completely with the fog from his breath, obscuring and fracturing the view of the building as the fog appears and disappears, much like society’s own memory for history.
Nearby are a related set of works that take on Käthe Kollwitz’s famed pietà sculpture Mother with her Dead Son (1937–39), which now resides in the Neue Wache. In one sculptural work, Chong has been able to make permanent his breath marks on 14 panes of glass, which are presented here on a plinth in row, one behind the other. On a wall is a black-and-white photographic print that compiles these breathes together into one composite image. Kollowitz created the work as a way to process her grief after her son was killed in World War I. Life is as fragile as breath, Chong seems to say.
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Jason Hirata at Fanta
Milan-based gallery Fanta has given over its booth to an iteration of Jason Hirata’s Floaters (2020), a version of which he showed at Artists Space in New York in 2019–20. In order to stage the work, the owner (or presenter in this case) must abide by the work’s medium description: “agreement that a ‘friendly entity loans their projectors to the exhibitor of this work.’” (At least two projectors are needed and the exhibitor can decide how many more, within their ability to add.) In this case, one person can never truly own the work being staged as its core components must be borrowed for a set period of time, and the work can only be completed once the projectors have been returned.
At Liste, the lending institutions are the Kunsthalle Basel, the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, the Stadtgalerie Bern, and artists Margherita Raso and Angharad Williams. Once that is taken care of, the staging of the work is quite simple; each projector must show the test screen used to calibrate the projector. In this instance, the calibration is for blue. It’s immediately obvious that there are tonal differences between each blue calibration; there is no perfect calibration.
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Chaveli Sifre at Embajada
In Booth 88, the fair’s final one, Berlin-based artist Chaveli Sifre is conducting a type of science experiment, a reverse alchemy of sorts. Sitting on a small table in the corner is a contraption that distills liquid from various currencies—dollars and euros mostly, including her own, those given to her, and ones found in wishing wells—along with several locally sourced medicinal plants and aromatic herbs that are native to Switzerland. Each day for about four hours, the machine is at work producing a scented extraction, which varies daily.
Sifre sees this as a decolonial tool that looks at how in a capitalist society our bodies are reduced to capital which we both willingly and unwittingly exploit in service of these structures. There’s a therapeutic element to this as well as a slightly tongue-in-cheek gesture that flips the concept of an art fair, especially in the financial center that is Basel, on its head: instead of art being exchanged for money, money is being made into art.
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Diana Sofia Lozano at Parallel Oaxaca
Diana Sofia Lozano has become known for her massive sculptures of tendril-like plants and flowers that point to the 18th-century taxonomic system created by Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus and still used as a scientific standard. But, as Barbara Calderón wrote in Art in America’s 2022 New Talent issue, that system is based on a heteronormative worldview that doesn’t quite exist in the natural world: “some plants’ gender identities and propagation methods are not so straightforward, and might in fact be best characterized as queer. Lozano helps her viewers savor that botanical defiance and think deeply about the complicated relationship between perception and subjectivity.”
The works on view at Liste are much smaller in scale and suspended from the ceiling, where they hang, almost like menacing birds ready to swoop in. Beneath the two are small heaps of powdered colored pigment that seem to be the mucus that these flowers might spray at an unwitting passerby.
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Mina Squalli-Houssaïni at Lodos
At the center of Lodos’s booth is a large metal table, atop which lays a handsewn textile, made from square patches or white, beige, and orange. On the fabric is printed the first map, dating to 1857, ever produced of Kabylia, a mountainous region in Algeria. Because of its terrain it was one of the last regions of the present-day country to be colonized by the French. At some point in time, the original map came into the possession of artist Mina Squalli-Houssaïni’s family and was passed down through the generations. The Geneva-based artist’s family had sought asylum in Switzerland from Algeria, prior to her birth in Lausanne in 1994; Squalli-Houssaïni draws on that migration experience in creating her art. Dotted across the map are several small sculptures of red ants, which Squalli-Houssaïni uses as non-human stand-ins to describe the strength in community and migration experiences.
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Lara Fluxà and Rosa Tharrats at Bombon
The two artists in this presentation by Barcelona’s Bombon gallery tackles the environment and current climate crisis in different ways. On the floor, Lara Fluxà presents fragile glass works, the slightest touch can shatter these elegant objects. The sculptures that have a milky tone are filled with soap, while those that are black are filled with motor oil. The fragility of these sculptures echoes that of our planet as we inch closer and closer to the point of no return (some have said we are already there or beyond).
Rosa Tharrats, meanwhile, thinks about self-care in face of such disaster. Her two textile-based sculptures, which recall the works of Sonia Gomes and Carolina Caycedo, can be entered by visitors, a way to shield them from the world around them. Upon entering, there is a sense of respite from the bustle of a busy art fair week.