Words Vidula KotianCurator Marcin LiwarskiDate 11 June 2025
The week kicks off with a vivid intervention by Katharina Grosse, who transforms Messeplatz into a sweeping gesture of color. Inside the halls, Unlimited returns with 68 monumental installations, while new sectors like Premiere spotlight works made in the past five years. From identity and mortality to environmental change and systems of value, here’s your chance to experience the boldest ideas shaping contemporary art.
Moving the Stars by Katharina Grosse, exhibition view, Centre Pompidou – Metz; Gagosian; Galerie Max Hetzler; Galerie nächstSt. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder © Adagp, Paris 2024, photo: Jens Ziehe
Living, Dead, and Yet Unborn by Sana Shahmuradova Tanska, Statements sector, courtesy the artist and Gunia Nowik Gallery
Starting at Messeplatz, home to the fair building, renowned artist Katharina Grosse will unleash a vivid explosion of color with her spray gun, transforming the fairgrounds into a dynamic canvas. Her bold installation is set to be a standout moment, fusing color, architecture, and public space in a powerful visual statement.
Art Basel’s platform for outsized ambition returns with 68 expansive projects curated by Giovanni Carmine, Director of Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen. This year’s selection includes monumental installations, towering sculptures, immersive video projections, and sprawling wall works—giving established names and emerging voices space to challenge conventions and scale up their ideas.
“Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres © Estate Felix Gonzalez-Torres, courtesy Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, photo: Aurélien Mole
METRO-Net Transportable Subway Entrance by Martin Kippenberger, installation view, Zuoz, Switzerland © 2025 Estate Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, photo: Pauline Martinet, courtesy Art Basel
Sham3dan performance by Nasa4nasa, film: Omar El Kafrawy
Martin Kippenberger’s METRO-Net World Connection series installs full-scale fake metro entrances in remote locations worldwide. Complete with ventilation shafts, they end at locked gates—an illusion of access denied, unlocked only by imagination. This project invites viewers to become “mind travelers,” using creativity to transform these structures into portals to boundless journeys beyond the physical.
The Cairo-based dance collective showcases Sham3dan (Candelabra) (2024), a 28-minute international premiere presented by Gypsum. Drawing on a 19th-century belly dance tradition, the performance explores themes of labor, control, and physical limits as dancers balance ornate brass candelabras on their heads, evoking the ghosts of past performers.
Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform) (1991) features a go-go dancer who performs for five minutes once a day to music of their choice—then disappears. The piece reflects on loss during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s while also resonating with ongoing anti-queer rhetoric worldwide.
Under the curatorial vision of Stefanie Hessler, Director of Swiss Institute (SI) in New York, Parcours transforms Clarastrasse and the Rhine riverbank into an open-air gallery with over 20 site-specific installations—including a major work at the former Hotel Merian and a large-scale piece on Münsterplatz. The 2025 edition centers on Second Nature, uniting artists who explore the shifting boundaries between nature and artifice.
"Until We Are More Than Gold" exhibition by Selma Selman, courtesy acb Galéria, Budapest and ChertLüdde, Berlin and Studio Selma Selman, Berlin, photo: Réka Hegyháti
Flesh in Stone – Ghost No. 9 by Yu Ji, installation view, courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London
A functional shop inside the Manor department store sells transparent raincoats featuring the artist’s signature style of serialized, endlessly repeating “superforms.”
Inside St. Clara Church, a commemorative installation of painted salvaged car hoods is brought to life with an evocative smell and soundscape.
Breathing life into the Rheinfelderhof Hotel, Yu Ji’s site-responsive intervention showcases sculptures shaped from cement, coral, and wax—organic forms that awaken each day through offerings of freshly baked bread made by the artist.
Showcasing fearless solo presentations, this sector introduces a dynamic lineup of emerging artists from across the globe. Born between 1983 and 1990, these creatives blend humor, technology, and a mix of traditional and industrial materials to confront and interpret the challenges of our complex world.
Here and Elsewhere, video installation by Ndayé Kouagou, courtesy Nir Altman Gallery, Munich
Gia Has Planted Seedlings Which Will Bloom by Nika Kutateladze at Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi
A Georgian artist specializing in installations and sculptures crafted from reclaimed Georgian building materials—sometimes incorporating entire structures within the gallery space—complemented by oil paintings in dark, earthy tones.
The Congolese artist explores uneasiness, power, and vulnerability. For Art Basel, he presents a 3.5-meter-high LED screen showing a reporter collecting eyewitness accounts of an event that cannot be described.
New this year—a dynamic exhibition sector showcasing artwork created in the past five years. Ten cutting-edge galleries present highly innovative works that capture the pulse of contemporary creativity. This sector highlights diverse voices and daring approaches—ranging from intimate personal stories to urgent ecological themes.
Beroana (shell money) by Taloi Havini, courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation
Bee Relief / The Liberation of Animal from their Cages VII by Lin May Saaed
Patricia crafts monumental rope sculptures from abacá—a fiber native to the Philippines also called Manila hemp. Her woven paintings challenge material hierarchies with swirling fiber compositions. Taloi unveils a new series of ceramic sculptures inspired by beroana, or shell money, traditionally used in Indigenous Pacific trade systems.
The Iraqi-German artist and activist passed away in 2023 at age 50, just as her work was gaining global recognition. A solo booth will feature her celebrated Styrofoam reliefs and bronze sculptures, often exploring animals and their relationships with humans.
If the lineup of artists and galleries at Art Basel isn’t enough, the city offers even more to explore.
Costume by Adéla Janská, Adrian Sutton Gallery
The Forgotten Procession by Marc Standing, Graham Contemporary Gallery
Celebrating 20 years of championing emerging art, VOLTA Basel 2025 showcases over 65 galleries from 20+ countries in a dynamic festival of discovery and connection. New this year: the MENA Pavilion, curated by Beirut-based writer Randa Sadaka, spotlights fresh and returning galleries from the Middle East and North Africa—including Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Iran, and Lebanon. Plus, Arthouse Basel is offering exclusive passes to its guests.
Walter Robinson courtesy of the artist and Sébastien Bertrand, Geneva, photo: Pol Le Vaillant
And Beneath It All Flows Liquid Fire by Julian Charrière, © 2025 ProLitteris, Zürich
The city’s hippest offsite event, Basel Social Club, mixes emerging art, concerts, and fresh locations each year. Past editions have transformed a former mayonnaise factory outside the city center and a countryside venue featuring dance icon Haddaway. This year, it takes over 100 rooms of a historic private bank—opening its doors to the public for the first time—turning the space into an immersive exploration of finance, value, and trade. From a Swiss Red Cross blood bank to beauty and games, each room offers a unique experience with participatory performances throughout.
Evenings feature live music alongside the provocative Barbershop project from Harlesden High Street and Kendra Jayne Patrick. Plus, LIVE SALON, where artist and barber Faisal Abdu’Allah turns haircuts into conversations on identity. Meanwhile, Jeff Koons Special Sale mocks the art market by producing balloon dogs sold at 0.01% of Koons’ price, exposing art’s value absurdities.
French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière explores how humans inhabit the world—and how the world inhabits us. His solo exhibition Midnight Zone presents photographs, sculptures, installations, and new video works that delve into our relationship with Earth as a watery planet. This liquidity—found in seas, lakes, and ice—hosts countless organisms and sustains crucial circulatory systems vital to climate stability.
Little Room, virtual reality (VR) installation by Jordan Wolfson, © Jordan Wolfson, courtesy Gagosian, Sadie Coles HQ, and David Zwirner
Eternity by Urs Fischer © Urs Fischer, photo: Stefan Altenburger
Jordan Wolfson’s new VR piece, Little Room, invites visitors—paired with a companion or a stranger—to undergo individual 3D full-body scans before entering a virtual space where they see themselves through each other’s bodies, resulting in strange and disorienting physical and spatial distortions. Also on view at Fondation Beyeler is an exhibition of Vija Celmins, showcasing a selection of works from the 1960s to the present. The show brings to vivid life the mesmerizing effect of her pictorial worlds.
In collaboration with Fondation Beyeler, Globus will present Urs Fischer’s Skinny Sunrise as the crowning highlight of its three-year renovation on Basel’s historic market square. Urs will transform the remodeled Globus facade and nearby sites—including the market square and the Totehüsli, a former church charnel house—into a striking installation. Renowned for his provocative sculptures and installations, Urs’ work references Basel’s medieval Dance of Death, a powerful symbol of life’s transience and mortality’s ever-present reality.
Man-eater by Miruna Radovici, courtesy of the artist and Suprainfinit gallery
Les bourgeois de Calais by Auguste Rodin, photo: Martin P. Bühler
A sculptor, photographer, and master of artistic staging, Medardo Rosso (1858–1928) was a rival to Auguste Rodin and a pioneer who helped reshape modern sculpture—yet remains relatively underrecognized today. Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture seeks to change that, with around 50 of his sculptures and 250 photographs and drawings on view.
The exhibition places Rosso’s work in dialogue with over 60 artists spanning more than a century—from Degas, Brâncuși, and Hesse to Kusama, Gober, and Warhol—highlighting his lasting impact. Following the artist’s own principle of comparative vision, the show unfolds as a dynamic exchange across generations, revealing Rosso’s enduring relevance to both his contemporaries and today’s leading voices.
Celebrating its 30th edition in 2025, Liste has grown from a bold 1996 initiative by young gallerists into the leading international fair for a new generation of contemporary art. This anniversary edition brings together 99 galleries from 31 countries—including 48 first-time participants—showcasing the relevance and diversity of emerging artistic voices. With its signature focus on solo presentations and boundary-pushing practices, Liste remains a launchpad for artists gaining their first international visibility.
#007 by Chris Tille, Camille Corot, Barbizon
Works and Games by Sou Zeller
Launched in 2019, June is a gallery-led international art fair that offers a thoughtful alternative to the conventional fair experience. Prioritizing an open format and intimate scale, June features a highly selective, intergenerational roster of participants that fosters collaboration and dialogue. The fair unfolds in a striking concrete bunker—transformed into a gallery by Herzog & de Meuron—alongside the Landhof Community Garden, reflecting June’s independent, community-driven spirit. It offers a moment of calm and reflection amid the hectic fair week.
A special project this year, People’s Soup, curated by Tobias Kaspar and Li Zhenhua, invites daily participation in a communal soup ritual—prepared with donated local ingredients and shared in bring-your-own bowls. Embracing cooking as a relational practice, the project embodies June’s ethos of generosity, sustainability, and shared experience.
Photography lovers have their own destination during Basel Art Week. Photo Basel brings together galleries from around the world in an intimate, authentic setting, serving as an inclusive platform for dialogue across the art world. The fair champions photographic art through a dynamic program aimed at both seasoned collectors and curious newcomers. This year’s curated highlight, Beyond Photography, features artists pushing the medium’s boundaries—blending mixed media, experimental printing, and sculptural forms that move photography into new dimensions.
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