ART CITIES:Basel-A Tooth for an Eye
The title of the exhibition “A Tooth for an Eye”, at Kunsthalle Basel, is borrowed from a song title that reimagines the Old Testament code of corporeal retaliation (an eye for an eye) or (a tooth for a tooth), proposing non- commensurable exchange in its stead. Simultaneously, the title points to the human body as a central aspect of social and political systems across history.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Kunsthalle Basel Archive
The exhibition “A Tooth for an Eye” focuses on the representational outsides and the inscrutable insides of bodies, the dependencies they have (on other bodies as much as on supplemental objects) and the mutational possibilities open to them. The featured works dissolve the body into smoke, partition it into pieces, reveal the limits of its control, and examine the traces it builds and leaves behind. Like a body, the exhibition is not a stable entity, but transforms from room to room as visitors encounter works by sixteen artists from different generations working around the body: conceptually, archaeologically, experimentally, sensually. Upon entering the exhibition, the visitor’s body already forms part of Gerome Gadient’s sound piece, which records the footsteps of visitors, subjects them to logarithmic manipulation, and transmits them back into the exhibition space as an eerie soundtrack. Other works evoke the body through its traces and the environments in which it circulates. Daniel Kurth’s “Self Portrait” shows the artist’s own worn-out sneakers, from which a fugitive smoke rises, as if the artist himself has evaporated. Kurth also uses the absent body in another piece, “Amazing Luxury Hilltop Houses That Will Blow Your Mind”, a compilation of commercials for luxury homes that removes all human life, showing only the empty, pretty shells of a commercialized, glossy world for people with capital. In the center of the room, Jeronim Horvat’s “Mono-bloc”, a plaster cast in two parts taken from the most widely available plastic chair in the world, speaks about both the globalization of modern consumer culture and the bodies that are shaped by its products. In room 2, a work by Philipp Hänger, “Es gibt NUDE – und es gibt NAKED”, unfolds on two walls and will be continuously altered over the course of the exhibition. Hänger works with layers of photographs (both found and newly made), textual elements, and overpainting, to create visual essay that fuses object and subject, (corporeal) protection and exposure, blankness and image excess. The piece is joined by two series of small-scale sculptures by Jeronim Horvat in bronze and high-tech plastic, derived from the modern fitness and entertainment industry. Everyday objects of another kind are the basis for the series “Armes Blanches” Inès P. Kubler, who has encased various sharp implements (scalpels, oyster shuckers and others) in wax to resemble prehistoric artifacts, like humankind’s first tools. In a nearby showcase, Kasper Ludwig’s faces and heads made from balloon casts are laid out like anthropological specimens. The final room of the exhibition hosts Hannah Gahlert’s sculptural installations, in which a variety of materials meet: soft and hard, arching and writhing, sometimes tamed only by a metal box or ceramic bands. The objects of Dominik His, on the other hand, appear more controlled in their materiality, their shell- like surfaces and meticulously crafted forms evoking alien eggs or imaginary architectures. In the triptych by Mirjam Walter propel their interiors almost violently outward, suggesting bodies in which neat distinctions between interior and exterior, self and other, exuberance and containment, are volatile and unreliable.
Participating Artists: Camille Brès, Mona Broschár, Simona Deflorin, Gerome Gadient, Hannah Gahlert, Axel Gouala, Philipp Hänger, Dominik His, Jeronim Horvat, Daniel Kurth, Kaspar Ludwig, Inès P. Kubler, Claudio Rasano, Dorian Sari, Simone Steinegger, and Mirjam Walter.
Info: Curators: Elena Filipovic, Claudio Vogt, and Renate Wagner, Kunsthalle Basel, Steinenberg 7, Basel, Duration: 24/11-30/12/18, Days & Hours: tue-Wed & Fri 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-20:30, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.kunsthallebasel.ch
