artmin | 20. September 2021

Exhibitions during Art Basel Week 2021

Following our extensive guide on fairs, there are also quite a few interesting exhibitions taking place during Art Basel Week. So, let’s take a look!

First up on our personal list of favorite places is Vitra Design Museum. The Schaudepot, and from Thursday onwards also the Museum itself, will be turned into spaces that explores women’s design. Spot On: Women Designers in the Collection sets a focus on female designers in the Vitra collection, the museum exhibition Here We Are! Women in Design 1900 – Today offers a unique insight into the work of female designers throughout history. Vitra’s goal is to amplify women’s voices and to question both their own collection practice as well as that of other museums, historians, and the public.

Moreover, until January 2022, the Vitra Design Museum Gallery is housing an exhibition featuring the design-collective Memphis. Their love for vibrant colors and patterns – as well as the use of symbols from pop culture and advertising – attempts to subvert the idea of what constitutes ‘good taste’ and humorously ask us to overcome the expectation that furniture must be functional.

Another institution worth visiting is Museum Tinguely, which holds a special anniversary exhibition onboard the MS Evolutie which closes in Basel on the 25^th & 26^th of September with a big public anniversary program. The boat has been travelling through various places that played a central part in the life of Swiss artist Jean Tinguely and exhibits replicas of his kinetic works, accompanied by a range of cultural activities.

Aside from this, there is also a solo exhibition dedicated to the experimental filmmaker Bruce Conner (until 23 November). His work is radical, rebellious and ironic and expresses the artist’s anarchistic nature. The exhibition called Light out of Darkness is a realization of another exhibition which was supposed to take place in the 1980s but never actually happened due to Conner’s disagreement with not only the terms of the exhibitor (The University Art Museum in Berkeley), but also the art market itself. Leu Art Family (until 31 October) presents the work and life of a family dedicated to tattoos.

Next up is the Swiss Architecture Museum (S AM), where Mock-Up will be shown until the 31st of October. The exhibition consists of a photo series by David K. Ross and additional architectural works which show different Mock-up projects that don’t serve the purpose of being a model for another project. Instead, they are projects of their own, revealing the mock-up’s experimental and poetic potential.

Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger | KBH.G is hosting an exhibition on MUSIC, featuring over 80 lyrical discussions by artist-duo Admir Jahic and Comenius Roethlisberger with other artists, which are exhibited as drawings, in the handwritten format and as neon installations. (until 14 November)

Furthermore, Kunstmuseum Basel’s current main exhibition in the Hauptbau, The Studio of Modernism, is dedicated to Camille Pissarro. Although he ranks among the most distinguished artists of nineteenth-century France, it has been more than sixty years since a museum in Switzerland devoted a presentation to this eminent artist. The second exhibition at the Hauptbau, Shadows: Images and Imagination, finishes together with Art Basel Week on the 26^th of September. It features works from the renaissance to the present, all of which differently explore the notion of shadows.

At the museum’s Neubau, a solo exhibition with Kara Walker will finish at the same time. It consists of over 600 drawings and texts which provocatively and satirically discuss racism, gender, sexuality and violence.

Meanwhile, Foundation Beyeler’s exhibition Close-up will run from September 19^th up until January 2022. The exhibition will represent portrait (and self-portrait) art from nine women artists from the 1870s up until today and also portrays nine very different artistic career paths.

Last but not least, Kunsthalle Basel is running three exhibitions during Art Basel week. Pronto, a solo exhibition by Matthew Angelo Harrison, finishes on the 26^th of September and features an installation made of a mix of 3D technology, African artefacts and materials from workers unions. The artist’s focus lies on shedding light onto the horrors of colonial history.

Moreover, the group exhibition INFORMATION (Today) explores how our data is being collected, and how discriminative algorithms play a big role in the functioning of 21^st century capitalism. Moreover, the exhibition critiques how information is processed and questions the impact increased technological monitoring has on our current existence (until 10 October 2021).

Finally, until March 2022, the back wall of the museum will be turned into a work by Yoan Mudry who combines symbols from pop culture, advertising and marketing campaigns as well as elements from film, social media, comics, and emojis in order to create a visually striking artwork.

Moving on, the Kunsthalle Palazzo’s group exhibition Interior will exhibit works from four artists, each of which will turn a room into a unique space for exploration of the ‘inside’ – both physically and mentally. While one room will be covered in colorful patterns, another will be the reconstruction of a dream in which the artist saw the room where she will die.  Yet another room will humorously change our perception of the everyday, while the last room will be a completely fictional space. The exhibition opens on September 11th and finishes on the 21^st of October.

Another must-visit is Kunsthaus Baselland, where four exhibitions are taking place. Firstly, a solo exhibition by Marina Rosenfeld, which, like all other indoor exhibitions at Kunsthaus Baselland, concludes with Art Basel week on the 26^th of September. The exhibition We’ll Start a Fire shows various works from the artist’s career within music, intervention, sound and musical performance. It thus centrally – but not exclusively – explores the medium of sound. Moreover, Andrea Blum, who has been appointed as a knight of art and literature by the French Minister of culture, is holding a solo exhibition called Parallel Lives. Her practice combines sculpture, architecture and design and critically discusses the relationship between the socio-political, private and psychological spheres. Thirdly, there is Anna Maria Miolino’s solo exhibition, which features a selection of the artist’s work from the past 50 years. The mediums range from video to photography, drawing, sculpture and text and aim to tell a story about the artist’s life from the 1970s up to now. Especially her identity as a woman, artist and immigrant will subject of discussion, but also cultural problematics and the human condition itself are thematized. Last but not least, and on view until the end of the year, we have the artist duo Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzinger, who created a large-scale banner on the outside of the museum’s walls.

Moving on with galleries, Artstübli in Basel is hosting the exhibition Colourful Fruits (until 23 October). This features a range of works from Philipp Tschanz (aka Dest) and Pietro Del Sonno (aka g204) who, since 1989, work as a duo called ‘TCC – The Color Children’. Before this, they were founding members of the Writers Crew, which played a central part in Basel’s Hip-Hop, Breakdance, DJ and Graffiti scene. The exhibition represents the fruits of their 30-year long careers within street art and consists of dynamic forms, colors and surfaces.

A second gallery focused on urban art, Guillaume Daeppen Galerie, is showing a solo exhibition of Ana Vujić: Terrain Vague. Her charcoal drawings, including wall-filling formats, are inspired by everday scenes that somehow turn into surreal settings.

Looking across the border to France, we recommend you to render a visit to La Kunsthalle in Mulhouse. Circumnavigation Towards Exhaustion is a solo exhibition with works of the Brazilian artist  Clarissa Tossin. She takes up the current discussions on lifecycle, endurance and recycling of materials in today’s world.

Le19 CRAC in Montbéliard on the other hand is opening a new group exhibition on Thursday, September 23rd. Se souvenir du présent, esprits de l’assemblage. Works by over a dozen artists will show that assemblage is a paradigm that largely exceeds the mere technical process; both by the variety of media used by the invited artists (collage, sculpture, painting, writing, installation) as well as by its manifold ramifications (found footage, cut-up, mixing and sampling).

In Germany, the E-Werk Gallery for Contemporary Art in Freiburg presents a double feature with Vikenti Komitski and Patrick Goddard. Urban Ecologies considers the urban space as a multifaceted organism in which economic, social and ecological challenges are condensed. Ecology is understood as a term that indicate a revaluation of the relationship between technology and nature. Technology no longer serves nature, as it did in the history of rationality. Both areas are now viewed in a relational relationship, as intertwining and interpenetrating entities.