Summer / Autumn 2015 Program
Kunsthalle Basel
Steinenberg 7
CH-4051 Basel
Switzerland
www.kunsthallebasel.ch
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Continuing its venerable history of thought-provoking exhibitions by some of the most promising artists working today, Kunsthalle Basel announces its summer/autumn exhibition program. Anicka Yi, Vincent Fecteau, Maryam Jafri and Andra Ursuta will have their first solo appearances in Switzerland, each including new productions, extending Kunsthalle Basel’s commitment to both emerging artists and exceptional figures whose practices deserve greater visibility.
Anicka Yi: 7,070,430K of Digital Spit
June 12–August 16
Opening: June 11, 7pm
Book launch: June 16, 7pm
Perishable substances, from deep-fried flowers to recalled powdered milk, potato chips, or snail excretions, are the Korean-born artist Anicka Yi’s (b. 1971) medium of choice. They are also the building blocks for her peculiar brand of techno-sensual alchemy, which assaults the senses as much as it traffics in a strange emotional charge. The exhibition 7,070,430K of Digital Spit looks back at her practice via a vast new project spread across and imagined for the entire ground floor of Kunsthalle Basel. This show self-consciously acts as a coda to five years of production and exhibition making that has been organized around very personal subjects such as denial, divorce, and death. Yi now tackles the matter of forgetting by creating new work that refers to and takes up themes from her past production and incorporates an exhibition-specific smell—the scent of forgetting—which wafts through the galleries. The exhibition is accompanied by (and in a sense built around) a new artwork-as-publication impregnated with the scent of forgetting—its pages are meant to be burned after reading.
The exhibition and publication are co-produced with the Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette and generously supported by the Gaia Art Foundation, Roldenfund, and 47 Canal.
Vincent Fecteau: You Have Did the Right Thing When You Put That Skylight In
June 18–August 23
Opening: June 17, 7pm
Vincent Fecteau (b. 1969) has, over the last two decades, forged a singular aesthetic that mixes homespun materials (popsicle sticks, champagne corks, string, and the like), meticulous craft work, and a curious formal grammar. By turns wonky, erotic, extraterrestrial, or baroque—and sometimes all of these at once—his sculptures are built from small, slow accumulations in which layering, texture, and the work of the hand are all visible. You Have Did the Right Thing When You Put That Skylight In, the San Francisco–based artist’s largest exhibition to date and his first solo show in Switzerland, is a selection of sculptures spanning from 2000 to the present plus the premiere of a large new body of work. Comprised of images culled from magazines and other ready-made elements (shoeboxes, jewelry boxes, wicker baskets, and other lo-fi containers, all painted the matte-est of blacks), these wall sculptures manifest both a return to his origins (collage) and a significant new direction.
The exhibition is generously supported by Martin Hatebur.
Maryam Jafri: Generic Corner
August 28–November 1
Opening: August 27, 7pm
Involving video, photography, text, sculpture, and installation, Maryam Jafri’s (b. 1972) practice sits at the crossroads of cultural anthropology and conceptual art. Her work has its foundations in hard-nosed research and often includes an impressive array of documentary material that is rife with economic, political, and social implications. Her treatment and contextualization of that found matter connects to a conceptual photographic tradition that runs from Ed Ruscha to Christopher Williams as well as to cinema and theater—much more than it does to so-called “research-based” art. Her mordant works are driven by interrogations of global capitalism and power as well as theatrical staging, embodiment, and ritual. For her Kunsthalle Basel exhibition Generic Corner, Jafri’s first solo show in Switzerland and her largest exhibition to date, the Pakistan-born American artist presents a new series of photographic and object-based works as well as several other recent and older works, including two video pieces. Some are focused on household products and their relationship to questions of market demand and speculation. Others look at sites where S/M role-play activities are conducted, reveal the undersides of the production of erotic paraphernalia, or contemplate the privatization of copyright in the digital age.
The exhibition is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.
Andra Ursuta: Whites
September 4–November 1
Opening: September 3, 7pm
Andra Ursuta (b. 1979) calls upon a wide range of materials, from concrete to plaster, marble, fabric, and wax, and references rather prosaic objects, whether a swing set, stools, a batting cage, or a hairdressing parlor, and transforms it all into haunting results. Wrought with a mix of melancholy, nostalgia, and apprehension, her works suggest a sense of urgency and even a tinge of apocalyptic doom. In her hands, everything takes resonant shape with an undeniably dark symbolism. For her exhibition Whites at Kunsthalle Basel—her first solo presentation in Switzerland—the Romanian-born artist has developed a series of new sculptures that expand on a work she first made in 2013, titled Broken Obelisk. Returning to that vaguely anthropomorphic cast piece, she has created a large new family of eerie figures. Each has eye sockets or nostrils cast from human skulls sunk into its smooth surface, simultaneously recalling Barnett Newman’s eponymous monument (Broken Obelisk, 1963–67) and a decrepit, hooded figure. Spread across the expanse of the upstairs galleries, this ensemble of new sculptures and other pieces turns Kunsthalle Basel temporarily into a geriatric clinic for Western Modernism.
For further information and image requests, please contact press [at] kunsthallebasel.ch.
