Art Basel’s Unlimited Sector Opens a New Chapter Under Ruba Katrib
At Art Basel in Basel, the fair’s largest-format platform is entering a new phase. Unlimited 2026, staged in the vast halls of Messe Basel, is being organized for the first time by Ruba Katrib, chief curator and director of curatorial affairs at MoMA PS1 in New York. She takes over from Giovanni Carmine, who led the sector for five editions.
This year’s Unlimited includes 59 individual projects supported by 66 galleries, a slight dip from the 67 projects presented in 2025. But the scale remains formidable, and Katrib has emphasized that size alone is not the point. The sector, she said, is shaped by the relationship between monumentality and artistic ambition — a space where complete series, historic installations, and works rarely seen in full can be encountered with unusual clarity.
Among the projects she singled out are Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s “Hustlers” (1990–92), Thomas Ruff’s “jpegs: The September 11 Photographs” (2004–07), and Peter Hujar’s “The Gracie Mansion Show” (1974–85). The selection suggests a curatorial interest in works that are not only large, but structurally expansive: images and installations that unfold over time, or across a field of repeated forms.
That logic extends to the political and material concerns running through the sector. Tuan Andrew Nguyen turns unexploded ordnance dropped by the United States in Vietnam into a Calder-like monumental sculpture, while Zimbabwe-born Moffat Takadiwa works with keyboard keys, pen casings, and plastic-bucket handles to address the spread of waste through discarded materials.
Several installations sharpen the emotional register further. Chris Burden’s “L.A.P.D. Uniforms” (1993) presents 30 oversized Los Angeles police uniforms, each scaled to fit an officer over 2 meters tall. Made in the aftermath of the riots following the acquittal of the officers who beat Rodney King, the work still reads as a severe meditation on authority, surveillance, and institutional power.
Nearby, French artist Benoît Piéron (b. 1983) offers 15 mounds of pastel hospital bedsheets, which he describes as cairns. The reference is personal: after contracting meningitis and later being diagnosed with leukemia as a child, Piéron spent long stretches in hospitals, where folded sheets became imagined mountains and crevasses. The result is playful, but not innocent; the installation turns disorientation into a mode of movement.
Other works on view include Zsófia Keresztes’s “Mother Tongue II” (2026), with 15 open mouths and braided textile tongues; Isa Genzken’s untitled 2018 installation, built from airplane window panels and bench seats; and Eva Jospin’s “Panorama.” Together, they show Unlimited leaning into a broad question: what can large-scale art hold when it is asked to carry memory, violence, language, and the material traces of the present?
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