Artnews : The Best Monumental Works at Art Basel Unlimited, From an Animatronic Gorilla to a Wrapped Car (by Sarah Belmont)
The crowd at the 2024 edition of Art Basel Unlimited in Switzerland.COURTESY ART BASEL
Once again, Art Basel has taken over the Swiss city with various events, including Unlimited, the exhibition platform devoted to monumental installations that are larger than a regular art fair booth can hold.
The 172,000-square-foot hall reserved for Unlimited is currently home to 76 projects and live performances by Seba Calfuqueo, Resto Pulfer, and Anna Uddenberg and others. Giovanni Carmine, director of the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen in Switzerland, has curated this edition of Unlimited, which, for the first time ever, will also feature a People’s Pick award, selected by visitors themselves. A winner will be announced by the end of the week after the votes are tallied.
There is no shortage of old works that have returned to view here: Wu Tien-Chang’s Farewell, Spring and Autumn, which appeared in the Taiwanese Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale; Christo’s 2014 recreation of his 1963 wrapped Volkswagen; a 153-foot-long Keith Haring frieze from 1984; a reactivation of Carl Andre’s 1988 Körners Repose, consisting 50 floor units. But fear not, there are new works here, too.
Below, a look at some of the best and most impressive works on view in Art Basel’s Unlimited section.
Christo at Gagosian
Christo, Wrapped 1961 Volkswagen Beetle Saloon, 1963–2014.
Photo:©️Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation/Wolfgang Volz/Courtesy the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation and Gagosian
In February 1963, Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped a Volkswagen Beetle for their solo exhibition at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf, Germany. The car was a loan from Claus Harden, who asked that his vehicle be returned to him in its original state. (Many years later, Harden admitted that his request was one of the worst decisions of his life, since it had effectively undone a great artwork.) In 2013, Christo went back to Düsseldorf to give a lecture at the K20 museum. That’s when he decided to buy a mint-colored 1961 Volkswagen Beetle, similar to Harden’s car, to recreate his short-lived 1963 work. The new vehicle was wrapped in 2014, and reappears here now at Art Basel. It will stop you dead in your tracks.
Chiharu Shiota at Templon
Chiharu Shiota, The Extended Line, 2023–24.
Photo:Courtesy the artist and Templon
Chiharu Shiota usually draws from her personal life to address universal matters. That much is readily apparent in The Extended Line (2023–24), in which 93 or so miles of red string hanging from the ceiling. This stringy rain is pouring into a bronze cast of the Berlin-based artist’s open hands, out of which fly thousands of white papers, butterflies flocking to the sky. This jaw-dropping installation, which you can see from almost any vantage point in the Unlimited space, conveys Shiota’s experience as a cancer survivor. “What does it mean to be human? I am asking questions which I believe everyone-one is dealing with during their lifetime, and not really getting to a clear conclusion,” she said in a statement. “I believe in the strength of asking those questions together. While we have no answer, we still have the same suffering, regrets, and joys in life.”
Bettina Pousttchi at Buchmann Galerie
Bettina Pousttchi, Vertical Highways, 2024.
Photo:Fotoservice Berlin
I’m not so sure that a traffic cop would even recognize the crash barriers used in Bettina Pousttchi’s “Vertical Highways” series, presented here in its very first large-scale version. The reuse of everyday items like these is part of a century-old tradition pioneered by Marcel Duchamp, but Pousttchi’s sculptures are clearly manipulated—she doesn’t merely re-present her crash barriers. The German artist mechanically distorts those prefabricated items, usually meant, when displayed horizontally, to establish order in public spaces, into upright shapes. One presented here is turned on its end, so that it rises 19 feet into the air. A counterpart to it appears in a Berlin train station, perhaps a more apt place for it; a third work in the series is held by the artist in storage. “They are three sisters born from a single commission,” Pousttchi said.
Kresiah Mukwazhi at Jan Kaps
Kresiah Mukwazhi, Nyenyedzi nomwe (The Seven Sisters Pleiades), 2024.
Photo:Courtesy the artist and Jan Kaps
The young Zimbabwean artist Kresiah Mukwazhi focuses here on the sex workers that keep striking in the suburbs of her birth town with Nyenyedzi nomwe (The Seven Sisters Pleiades), a 26-foot-long work made of more than a thousand elastic straps, fabric, and clasps from used bras. Mounted to the wall, the work challenges a patriarchal system that brutally restrains the female body. The title of the installation refers to the Pleiades constellation, which, in Greek mythology, embodies the seven sisters turned into stars so that they could not be raped. Mukwazhi summons these mythological figures as a way to protect all the abused, violated, marginalized women on the planet—“to restore their sacred feminine power and heal the world,” as she has put it.
Ali Cherri at Almine Rech
Almine Rech's booth at Unlimited, featuring works by Ali Cherri.
Photo:Sebastiano Pellion di Persano/Courtesy the artist and Almine Rech
Three imposing mud sculptures of two armed men and a submitted (or maybe playful?) dog stand in front of a door leading to a screening room. Inside, Almine Rech gallery chose to show The Watchman (2023), the last episode of a tetralogy by Lebanese artist and filmmaker Ali Cherri. In this highly aestheticized 26-minute video, a character named Sergeant Bulut maintains a lonely vigil on top of a watchtower, expecting an enemy that never shows. Cherri debunks the notion that there is a duty to serve your country—an idea that is deeply embedded in the rhetoric of war more broadly. There is something Sisyphean about Bulut’s effort, which strips him of all heroism. Similarly, the soldiers guarding the entrance to the screening room are not as tough as they seem.
Ryan Gander at Lisson Gallery
Ryan Gander, School of Languages, 2023.
Photo:©Ryan Gander/Courtesy Lisson Gallery
In the middle of Unlimited is an intriguing office-like space where no-one seemed to dare enter at first. A half-hour after the VIP opening of the sector, however, the space was full of crouching people taking pictures of a female gorilla hidden under a desk. “It’s alive!” one young man said, noticing that the gorilla was moving. Fortunately, it was just an animatronic sculpture, but still, with its low-pitched groan and its wiggling fingers and toes, this animal seems oddly realistic. She’s named Brenda, and per a description for this work, she is learning how to count, a skill she needs to work her job and serve capitalism. The installation, titled School of Languages (2023), supposedly contains a fan that blows “a faint scent of damp and urine.” I must confess I did not smell anything, which I found to be a relief.
Henry Taylor at Hauser & Wirth
Henry Taylor, Untitled, 2022.
Photo:Jeff McLane/©Henry Taylor/Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles
Around another corner unfolds an installation of leather-jacketed mannequins standing in front of a wall banner begging us to “END WAR AND STOP RACISM!!!”and to “Support the Black Panthers,” a Marxist-Leninist and black power political organization that was active in the States mostly between 1966 and 1982. Here, Henry Taylor, a Los Angeles–based artist best known for his figurative paintings, pays dramatic homage to the Black Panthers and more particularly to his brother Randy, an active member of the party. “He made us all more politically conscious,” Taylor previously told Frieze of the piece, which appeared in a recent survey that first appeared at MOCA Los Angeles. “And I read everything he read … because I wanted to be just like him.”
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