Shuang Li Turns Storm Chasing Into a Study of Digital Desire at Kunsthalle Basel
At Kunsthalle Basel, Shuang Li’s exhibition Alliance uses storm-chasing videos to examine a distinctly contemporary condition: the feeling of being pulled by screens, systems, and spectacle at once. The presentation marks the Chinese artist’s first institutional solo show in Europe and centers on a major new film installation about tornadoes, hurricanes, and other extreme meteorological events.
Born in 1990 in China and now based in Berlin and Geneva, Li has built a practice across installation, video, interactive websites, and performance. Over the past decade, she has explored how online life fragments identity while also creating new forms of attachment. In Alliance, that inquiry narrows to a niche corner of social media, where live-streamed storm chasing becomes both subject and metaphor.
Li first encountered the phenomenon on TikTok, watching strangers drive toward tornadoes in real time. From there, the work expands into a broader reflection on the parallels between weather systems and media systems. Tornadoes form over flat land; Li sees a similar flattening in today’s information landscape, where attention is constantly pulled into competing vortices.
The exhibition links that image to climate instability, surveillance technologies, capitalist extraction, and the infrastructures that govern digital attention. Yet the work resists easy dystopia. Mohamed Almusibli, director and chief curator of Kunsthalle Basel, describes Li’s approach as one that does not simply illustrate technology, but makes viewers feel its texture — its weight, noise, and instability.
That emphasis on sensation matters. Alliance does not ask visitors to stand back and analyze catastrophe from a safe distance. Instead, it creates a more disquieting proximity, suggesting that the storm is not only on the horizon but already embedded in the systems through which people move, watch, and desire.
For all its ominous atmosphere, the exhibition remains unexpectedly tender. Li’s work recognizes that even inside corrupt or chaotic networks, people continue searching for connection. Alliance is on view at Kunsthalle Basel through September 12, offering a sharp, uneasy portrait of life lived inside the weather of the internet.
