Art Basel Unlimited Turns Scale Into the Story in Basel
At Art Basel’s Unlimited sector, size is not a side note. It is the organizing principle. The fair’s vast hall in Basel, Switzerland, measures about 172,000 square feet, creating room for 59 projects that push well beyond the scale of a conventional booth. The result is a concentrated survey of contemporary art that depends on physical presence: works you do not simply view, but move around, measure against your own body, and remember by their sheer material force.
Among the most commanding installations is Theaster Gates’s A libation in Uncertain Times (2024), which contains more than 1,000 sake bottles. Gates originally presented the work in his 2024 exhibition at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, where it functioned as both a celebration of long nights with friends and a tribute to the labor behind the brewing and glazing of each vessel. The piece fits neatly within Gates’s larger practice, which often relies on accumulation and the social histories embedded in ordinary objects.
White Cube is showing Tracey Emin’s Knowing My Enemy (2002), a 472-inch sculptural installation salvaged from Margate, the artist’s hometown in the U.K. Perched on a ramshackle wooden pier, the work reads as part hideaway, part lookout, with a title that carries a sharper edge than its weathered materials first suggest. Emin’s retrospective “A Second Life” is currently on view at Tate Modern in London through August 31, adding another layer of context to the piece’s appearance in Basel.
Niki de Saint Phalle’s Blue Obelisk with Flowers (1992) rises 160 inches high in stained and mirrored glass, fiberglass, and resin. Unlimited curator Ruba Katrib, chief curator and director of curatorial affairs at MoMA PS1, previously organized a widely praised Saint Phalle exhibition there in 2011, and her selection gives the artist a prominent place in this year’s sector. The work’s backstory, tied to Saint Phalle’s efforts to raise awareness about HIV and AIDS, lends its exuberant surface a more complicated emotional register.
Ortuzar and Fraenkel Gallery have recreated Peter Hujar’s 1986 exhibition at Gracie Mansion Gallery in New York, his last before he died of AIDS-related pneumonia the following year. The presentation includes 70 black-and-white photographs, among them lucid portraits of David Wojnarowicz and Greer Lankton, alongside animals and landscapes that feel unusually open, tender, and unsentimental.
Alfredo Jaar’s The Power of Words (1984/2021) adds a more overtly political note, using 16 rephotographed press images in a slide projector. Taken together, the works in Unlimited suggest that the sector’s power lies not only in spectacle, but in the way scale can sharpen memory, grief, and historical urgency. A special ticket costs 40 Swiss francs for Thursday, June 18, from 7 to 10 p.m., but the real draw is the chance to encounter these works at full size, in full force.
