Basel’s fair week is producing its own kind of civic portrait: one shaped by recycled textiles, algorithmic images, and performances about museums themselves.
At Volta, Lisbon-based Perve Galeria is presenting Flowing Upstream, an installation by German artist Martin Wöllenstein (b. 1970s) made from discarded costumes worn during the Ankos Masquerade in Ghana, the largest carnival in West Africa. The work transforms recycled carnival clothing into new textile structures, which Carlos Cabral Nunes, director of Perve Galeria, described as a refusal to treat the garments as mere relics or documents. Wöllenstein has said the project also inverts the usual direction of textile waste moving between the two continents, sending the material from Ghana to Basel via the Rhine.
The piece is one of several works across Basel fairs that use process as part of the subject. At Art Basel’s Zero 10 section, French artist William Mapan (b. 1980s) is showing Paysages Plausibles: Dances on Shadows, a live installation in which visitors generate a composition on the fair floor through an algorithm he devised. Hugo Pouchard, a cultural strategist working with Mapan, described the method as designing the rules and then allowing the unpredictable to emerge. The result is a work that gives the artist control over the system, but not over every image it produces.
At Liste, Los Angeles-based artist Erin Calla Watson (b. 1980s) is presenting Maternity, a video built from found clips of female models wearing prosthetic pregnancy bellies for fast-fashion e-commerce sites. Watson has linked the subtitles to Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina and to early internet subcultures, including the “sad-boy” figure, folding questions of fragmentation and desire into a study of mediated motherhood.
In Unlimited, Turner Prize-nominated artist Goshka Macuga (b. 1967) is staging M: A Re-enactment, a live performance featuring André Malraux, Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Macuga herself. According to Kate MacGarry gallery, the work explores the history and future of museums while collapsing temporal and institutional boundaries.
Outside the fair halls, Basel is also talking politics. A Swiss referendum to cap the country’s population at 10 million was rejected by nearly 55% of voters, with turnout at 60%. Switzerland’s current population is 9.1 million, and 27% are not Swiss citizens. For one curator at Basel airport, the influx of art-world visitors may be enough to make the number feel even more immediate.
