ART FAIRS:Art Basel 2019 Parcours

Founded in 1970 by gallerists (Ernst Beyeler, Trudi Bruckner and Balz Hilt) from Basel, Art Basel today stages the world’s premier art shows for Modern and Contemporary art, sited in Basel, Miami Beach, and Hong Kong. Defined by its host city and region, each show is unique, which is reflected in its participating galleries, artworks presented, and the content of parallel programming produced in collaboration with local institutions for each edition.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Art Basel Archive

The 50^th Edition of Art Basel features 290 International galleries that present works ranging from the Modern period of the early 20^th Century to the most contemporary artists. While galleries from Europe continue to be strongly represented, the show also features returning and new exhibitors from across the globe. Now in its 10tt Edition, the Parcours sector this year is presented under the title “The Impossibility of Being a Sculpture”. Highlights include “The recovered manifesto of Wissam (inaudible)” (2017) located in the Staatsarchiv by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, who was recently shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2019 and whose interest in sound and its intersection with politics is a central focus of his work.  Paweł Althamer’s surreal, large-scale figure, “Ochse” (2018), is born out of the artist’s interest in the subconsciousness and expressing the intangible. Reminiscent of an ox or ancient auroch, the sculpture derives from a dream the artist had in which he found a library of carved animal figures in a shadowless cave. In prehistoric times, the depiction of animals had a spiritual dimension for our ancestors; so too here, returning to their forms in the contemporary era suggests a connection to our inherent creativity and imagination. “Ochse” is made from organic materials including leather, wasp hives, coconuts, and shells. The viewer is invited to sit on the back of the Ochse. The shadowless cave with its array of creatures that Althamer dreamed about is indeed akin to the museum’s collection of Etruscan, Greek, Roman, and Egyptian sculpture, where it is aligned with the figure of the sacred bull, a stalwart figure of worship in numerous ancient societies. Pierre Bismuth’s practice can be placed within the tradition of Conceptual and Appropriation art and encompasses a wide range of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, film, and text. His work reflects on the transformation of the cultural sphere into an economy of cultural tourism and entertainment. Bismuth’s new series titled “Abstractions” is being shown at one of the oldest squares in Basel – the Münsterplatz. The project consists in the creation of new flag emblems, obtained by the superimposition of two existing national flags. The work is inspired by the present migratory movements towards Europe: One flag represents a migrant’s country of origin, the second a hypothetical European host country. Flags signal territories and nations – categories that still remain stable points of reference today. In this series, the creation of a symbol made out of merging two national flags establishes a sign for the phenomenon of mass migration, questioning current concepts of nationality. Installed on Münsterplatz, Dan Graham’s “Dancing Circles” (2018), at once sculptural and architectural, reflects and formally interact with its environment. Germaine Kruip presents a new site-specific light installation titled “Diamond”  (2018-present), on display at Kunstmuseum Basel. “Copper No. 32” (2015) by Hassan Sharif, a pioneering contemporary artist in the Gulf region who introduced the apotheosis of recycled materials and mass-produced objects as sculpture, is presented at an antiquarian bookshop in central Basel. For his long-term film project “The Villagers” (2019), which will be completed and screened in September 2019, Rinus Van de Velde created 17 life-size stage sets; one of them – titled “Prop, Flood, Roof” (2018) and installed in the Bau- und Verkehrsdepartement Basel-Stadt, Falkensteinerhof (Lichthof) and functions as both a stage set and an autonomous sculpture. “Untitled” (2018) by Cathy Wilkes is a site-specific installation of sculptural objects that have been appropriated from everyday life and crafted by hand. The piece was originally installed as part of Wilkes’ 2018 solo show at Yale Union, Portland, and for Parcours is presented in the Hedi Keller Saal at the Museum der Kulturen Basel.

Participating Artists : Pierre Bismuth, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Matias Faldbakken, Dan Graham, Laurent Grasso, Irena Haiduk, Camille Henrot, Germaine Kruip, Ad Minoliti. Antonio Obá, Reto Pulfer, Hassan Sharif, Ron Terada, Daniel Turner, Rinus Van de Velde and Cathy Wilkes

Info: Curator: Samuel Leuenberger, Various locations, Basel, Duration : 11-16/6/19, www.artbasel.com