ART FAIRS:LISTE Art Fair 2019

As a not-for-profit-oriented fair, LISTE Art Fair has consistently advocated for the promotion of new galleries since its founding in 1996. The fair strives to provide reasonable terms and conditions to galleries, thus easing their entry into the international art market. LISTE is considered the most important Art Fair for a young generation of Galleries and artist.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: LISTE Art Fair Archive

LISTE Art Fair faced a change in generations, Joanna Kamm succeeded longtime director Peter Bläuer, who co-founded the fair in Basel and stepped down after 23 years. Joanna Kamm said in her Interview that you will read in our magazine in a few days “The most important thing for me is to use all the channels at my disposal to point out the social significance of young art”. The participating galleries present artistic positions that not only examine the present but also create it – through new aesthetics, media and values – to an international audience of experts and art lovers alike. Under the premise of promoting young art, the LISTE committee selected 77 young and emerging galleries from 33 countries, with a strong focus on giving significant space to galleries from cities beyond the established art centres as on enabling galleries to show for the first time. A new initiative of LISTE is the Joinery. On the one hand it is a place where galleries can extend their presentations by showing videos and performances that exceed the limitations of their stands, while on the other hand it is a meeting point and think tank that considers the latest topics in contemporary art discourse. Oscar Santillán presents “Solaris”, a project developed in the Atacama desert. This geographical space is the driest place on Earth, ideal for astronomical observation. Santillán took sand from the ground and melted it to create lenses, then used to photograph the desert at different times of the day. This process suggests a landscape looking back to itself, like a subject in introspection. Stefanie Victor’s small-scale sculptures engage the languages of Minimalism and Geometric Abstraction while achieving a specificity of place and sentiment. The forms she creates can be understood through their carefully chosen materials, structure, scale, and modes of display. They refer to parts of and for bodies, as well as to jewelry, hardware, armor, and everyday objects, inviting a nuanced visual experience that extends across multiple categories and expectations. Juan Antonio Olivares presents a new series of drawings questioning the sight potential of the naked eye. Images coming from the Trappist telescope in Northern Chile are here to depict a black hole which is in itself only perceivable according to the movement of sunlight around it, sole indicator of its existence. The series “Fermi Paradox III” is a variation on a previous sound-sculpture made out of Mediterranean shells with a micro-speaker placed inside their cavities. Naoki Sutter-Shudo’s practice in sculpture and painting explores the interstices of language and culture, often focusing on slippages and doublings of meaning from a humorous and at times satirical perspective. Leandro Feal is one of the most interesting artists of the Cuban photographers’ young generation. His work maintains the reserved and intimate atmosphere of domestic photography, hence the spontaneity of his frames and the naturalness of his characters facing the camera. Catharine Czudej presents a group of solid concrete plinths that have cardboard cutouts of attractive young women advertising alcoholic beverages wrapped around them, or rather amalgamated into their surfaces. Despite these contortions, the girls never loose their cheerleader-smile and alluring poses. Drunk on capital gains and designed with gleefully indifference, Czudej’s girls bend over backwards to facilitate and memorialize your pleasure. Sebastian Jefford presents bulbous tablets, whose surfaces are engraved with representations of randomly assembled depictions of an impending ecological collapse. The dramatic urban development in Tehran over the past decade has been the main focus for Nazgol Ansarinia’s work. She has worked with architectural models, municipal murals and miniature monuments that capture the intersection between the sacrosanct domestic sphere and the broader built environment. Her architectural process is one that is fundamentally based on deconstruction. For Liste, the artist presents a new sculptural body of ceramic work that is a continuation of her recent project “Demolishing buildings, buying waste” in which she recorded an entire building being demolished by pick-axe and shovel over the period of 16 days. The rubble that is swept off- screen becomes a basis for interrogation by the artist and appears in a multitude of new sculptural forms and works on paper. In these works, Ansarinia portrays that moment between demolition and creation, dissection and construction, disorder and pattern. Mathis Gasser presents new paintings based on images of spaceships. The artist has, in recent years, made a series of works on paper and paintings with the trope of spaceships and other science fiction imagery. For Gasser these objects, besides their sculptural quality as imagined ‘forms in space’, these ships express a human desire and madness to explore. Julie Béna’s work oscillates between performance, installation and theater. Proceeding through incongruities, shifts and displacements, Béna diverts everyday images and objects. They gradually become the subjects of a variety of strange, poetic fictions. Through installation, photography, video or performance, the artist explores moments of transition, tuning in on the imperceptible and refining those minute moments into self-reflective action. Patrick Goddard has created a new video centering on a feral dog racing through a giant abandoned warehouse. The accompanying narration fluctuates between didactic proclamations on post-Fordist economies and self-doubting personal mumblings, and any authoritative tone is undermined by a self-defeating black comedy. The meandering monologue touches on Brexit psychologies and individual culpability in this anarcho-poetic anti-manifesto. Liv Schulman’s focuses her work in the performative capacity of language for creating new relations that re-interpret affects and bodies under our current economy. Liv Schulman’s work deals with the place of subjectivity within the political space, the difficulty of giving it credit. It makes us adhere to its theses at the same time as it scuttles them. In the unbelieving belief of her production, to create implies to experience directly a medium, a system, a subject. Buhlebezwe Siwani  produced a new series of soap drawings that evoke the act of cleansing, especially in relation to the black body. Green soap is a well-known and used product in South Africa’s rural areas by people with modest socio-economic conditions. The newly produced, large-size drawings hang from the ceiling and touch the ground: their monumental proportions do not adhere directly to a human body,but suggest a collective dimension. Their appearance evokes a graffiti-like urban intervention,reminding another kind of impurity.   Anca Benera & Arnold Estefán  continue their recent extensive project titled “Debrisphere”, an investigation on the phenomenon of man-made landscapes which are often the result of conflicts and wars. The artists have coined the term “Debrisphere” to refer to this, as yet unnamed, stratum of the earth’s crust. They employ seemingly “scientific tools” in order to imagine and map this new strata, in which destruction, the making and marking of landscape (as a form of spatial modification) go hand in hand with heightened state violence and the overexploitation of resources.

Info: Director: Joanna Kamm, LISTE Art Fair 2019, Burgweg 15, Basel, Days & Hours: Preview: (by invitation only) Mon (10/6/19) 11:00-18:00, Public Opening: Mon (10/6/19) 18:00-21:00, Tue-Sat (11-15/6/19) 13:00-21:00, Sun (16/6/19) 13:00-18:00, Admission: Single entry” CHF 20, Reduced entry: CHF 10 (Students/Seniors/AHV), Free admission for kids up to 16 years, if accompanied by an adult, After 20:00: Single entry CHF 6, Students-Seniors-AHV free admission, www.liste.ch