Chloe Wise Turns to the Unexplainable in Basel
At Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger, Chloe Wise (b. 1990) has made a decisive shift: for her first major institutional exhibition in Switzerland, the Canadian artist has set painting aside in favor of a multichannel video and immersive installation that treats belief, spectacle, and the supernatural as overlapping languages. Titled Extrasensory and curated by Samuel Leuenberger, the exhibition opens in Basel with a gift-shop-like installation before moving into a world built from science fiction, religion, consumer objects, and art-historical quotation.
Wise says the project is less interested in delivering answers than in staging the difficulty of asking the right questions. Its title refers to extrasensory perception, or the sixth sense, and she describes the subject as something that “evades definition at every turn.” To approach it, she borrows from a wide range of visual and cultural systems: the Bible, prayer beads, tarot decks, cult documentaries, angels, and the language of science fiction. The result is not a single thesis but a series of fragments that ask how people try to give form to what cannot be neatly explained.
That logic extends to the exhibition’s opening gesture. Wise has said she likes the idea that something profound might first be encountered through a tchotchke, or trinket, collapsing divinity, consciousness, and non-human intelligence into the realm of consumer display. The move is characteristic of an artist who has long worked with presentation and performance, even in her paintings of friends and cultural figures. Here, however, she pushes that interest into a more expansive environment.
Although Extrasensory may read as a departure, Wise says it grows out of work she has been making for years. She has been producing installations and videos for 10 years, she noted, even if those projects have not received the same visibility as her paintings. For this exhibition, she worked with a 70-person team, underscoring the collaborative scale of the project and her interest in world-building rather than isolated image-making.
Wise also frames the exhibition through Flatland, Edwin A. Abbott’s satirical novella about the limits of perception. The analogy is apt: Extrasensory does not claim to reveal the unseen so much as to show how language, images, and belief systems strain toward it. In Basel, Wise has built an exhibition that treats uncertainty not as a problem to solve, but as the condition that gives the work its shape.
