Exhibition season 2024–25

The Bass announces its 2024–25 program of exhibitions that explore how performance and the theatrical are interwoven with personal, professional, social, and political life.

Performing Perspectives: A Collection in Dialogue 
August 28, 2024–ongoing
Performing Perspectives, a major reinstallation of the museum’s permanent collection, puts forth a fresh selection of works and long-term loans from the Early Renaissance to the present day. With this presentation, The Bass invites viewers to consider performance as a broad concept and multifaceted dynamic, undergirded by thematic groupings: “Performance of Self,” “Backdrop for Performance,” and the “Indexicality of Performance.”

Over the coming year, these framing devices—both physical and metaphorical—are intended as a springboard for thinking with and alongside audiences. As a “Collection in Dialogue,” Performing Perspectives encourages visitors to take time, look longer, and deeply sense the correspondences among works of art and their spatial (even theatrical) configurations, all set against large-scale images of The Bass culled from the museum’s historical archive.

Ulla von Brandenburg: In Dialogue
August 28, 2024–August 24, 2025
The Paris-based German artist Ulla von Brandenburg was commissioned by The Bass to create two large-scale curtains placed in proximity to a majestic, newly acquired abstract mural (Untitled, 2023) by the Lebanese-American artist Etel Adnan (1925–2021). Adnan’s geometric paintings and drawings were often translated into murals and tapestries, and reflect an enduring interest in architecture shared with von Brandenburg—as well as the Ukrainian-born French artist Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979), who also figures in the mix. In Dialogue explores these cross-generational engagements with geometric abstraction and the artists’ shared fascination with the social and spatial.

Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years 
September 25, 2024–August 17, 2025
Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years is a presentation spanning almost three decades of work by the New York–based artist and her first major exhibition in her hometown. Displaying Feinstein’s multidisciplinary approaches to artmaking—encompassing sculpture, painting, video, and installation over the course of her career—The Miami Years reflects on intimacy, vulnerability, and abjection, themes in Feinstein’s compelling examination of human behavior and female identity. Additionally, her massive, site-specific commission of painted mirrors pictures the Miami region with its contradictory marks of sophistication and decadence, merging architectural styles culled from local history. The Miami Years is the artist’s first exhibition to consider the underlying impact of South Florida’s collective imagination and extreme realities on her rich and sweeping oeuvre.

(LA)HORDE: Heureux sous son ombre
October 16, 2024–April 27, 2025
In 2017, the Paris suburb of Bondy and Centre National de la Danse invited (LA)HORDE—the multidisciplinary collective of artists Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer, and Arthur Harel—to produce a choreographic portrait of the commune and its residents. Representing a wide demography of age, gender, and cultural background, participants found themselves dancing, and directing themselves as they danced, in public and private venues of their choice. The result is Bondy (2017), a mesmerizing video portrait of a contemporary globalized community and the exhibition’s centerpiece, alongside two newly commissioned sculptures inspired by this storied locality. This is (LA)HORDE’s first exhibition in the United States.

assume vivid astro focus: XI
November 13, 2024–October 26, 2026
XI—an immersive installation created by the São Paulo–based collective assume vivid astro focus in 2004 for Art Basel Miami Beach—features patterned vinyl wallpaper, floor-to-ceiling decals, and mobile sculptures that can shape-shift into interchangeable sets and stage pieces. Re-presented at The Bass on the work’s twentieth anniversary, XI is activated by all who enter it, becoming a site of boundless potential, inviting performances and interactions, and dissolving distinctions between artist and audience. A recent gift to the museum from Miami patrons Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz, XI remains eternally relevant by exploring the fluid boundaries of spontaneous collective creation.

The exhibitions are curated by James Voorhies, The Bass Chief Curator, and Claudia Mattos, Associate Curator of New Media Art.