Montbéliard | ArtRegion: Basel - Oberrhein

Le 19 – Centre régional d’art contemporain

Ricardo Basbaum: AH! OH!

8. Februar – 4. Mai 2025

“To start with, then, there isn’t very much:
nothingness, the impalpable, the virtually
immaterial; extension, the external, what is
external to us, what we move about in the midst
of, our ambient milieu, the space around us.
Space. Not so much those infinite spaces […]
but spaces that are much closer to hand,
in principle anyway: towns, for example, or
the countryside, or the corridors of the Metro,
or a public park.”
(Avant-Propos de Georges Perec in Espèces d’espaces, Éditions Galilée, 1974)

AH! OH! by Ricardo Basbaum and À votre contact, se confondre [At your contact, blending in] by Kelly Weiss are two exhibitions that share a certain ‘poetics of space’. Both explore plastic, conceptual and relational variations, resulting from a negotiation undertaken with the context of the art centre and its architecture. Based on a close observation of the ins and outs of the historic building, and of the movement and communication between its different parts, Kelly Weiss and Ricardo Basbaum took on the different types of space as playgrounds. She and he come then to certain kind of ‘agreements’.

AH! OH! and À votre contact, se confondre [At your contact, blending in] both respond to specific logics of scores and ‘mise en scène’. These are fluid, however, and open to the collaboration of the publics, who become the guarantors of the constant evolution and even reconstruction of the exhibitions themselves.

“subhydroinfraentre
resonant aquatic vibrosiades
on the edge of intrusive vibrolution”.

Ricardo Basbaum (b. 1961, São Paulo, Brazil; lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is an artist whose practice explores how art can serve as both a platform and an intermediary for articulating sensory experience, sociability and language. His works often invite viewers to act by responding to systems of symbols, rules embedded in scripts, the reading of scores and diagrams, or the activation of games.

Since the late 1980s, he has created a specific vocabulary for his work, which he applies in a particular way to each new project. NBP [New Basis for Personality] explores the full complexity of subjectivity 5. The beginning of this project coincided with the end of the military dictatorship in Brazil and the rise of globalisation. Made up of words and lines, his wall diagrams can be seen as drawings, visual poems that conjure up images, actions and relationships. The diagram is a connector, a mediator and an activator between the work, the space and the subjectivity of the public. NBP is also activated through the production of installations, videos, sound performances and urban interventions.