Exhibition Program Summer 2018

Raphaela Vogel: Ultranackt
through August 12, 2018

Vertigo-inducing, voyeuristic views and radio-controlled drone technologies characterize Raphaela Vogel’s (*1988, Nuremberg, Germany) image making, in which she remains at once camera operator, editor, sound technician, costume and lighting designer, and sole human protagonist of her videos. And if there is a thread that runs through the artist’s work like a red-hot vein, it is the centrality of the artist herself, unabashedly exposed and exposing—if not literally naked, then metaphorically so, baring it all. Her appropriation of her image and the technologies to represent it remains one way of expressing this, and it’s acutely visible in this first solo exhibition outside her native Germany.

Entitled Ultranackt, the exhibition privileges Vogel’s sculptural, installative practice; the elaborate and palpably physical constructs within which the artist shows her sound pieces and videos are revealed to be integral to her thinking and practice. Through these she forges, as one critic has noted, a body of work unabashedly “about femininity and power, through which instead of getting lost in empowering declarations, the artist creates a new vocabulary—one that turns male symbols into sculptural elements.” Thus inserting herself into a world of men, Vogel acts as a defiant agent, powerful and in your face, cheekily rebutting masculine authority and everything it has for too long claimed as its own.

With generous support from Luma Foundation and Studio Botanic, and additionally supported by Rudolf Augstein Stiftung, Ernst und Olga Gubler-Hablützel Stiftung, and Roldenfund.

Luke Willis Thompson: _Human
June 8–August 19, 2018
Opening: Thursday, June 7, 7pm

For his first solo exhibition in Switzerland, Luke Willis Thompson (*1988, Auckland, New Zealand) presents _Human, a subjective historiography of another artist’s work told through a silent 35 mm film. Thompson’s subject is an artwork by the late British artist Donald Rodney, My Mother, My Father, My Sister, My Brother (1997): a tiny, fragile sculpture in the form of a house made from skin that Rodney collected from one of his numerous operations while hospitalized, held together with dressmakers’ pins and cellophane tape. Thompson revisits that poignant artwork, as well as the themes of police violence, racism, mortality, and trauma that so preoccupied Rodney. As a conceptual project that takes filmic form, Thompson’s quietly transfixing result overlays Rodney's biography and interrogations with Thompson’s own to create moving images that are at once abstract and particular.

_Human (2018) is the third film in a trilogy of sorts, including Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries (2016) and autoportrait (2017), continuing Thompson's engagement with exploring the complexities and contradictions of identity, inheritance, and subjecthood. 

With generous support from Peter Handschin, Martin Hatebur, and Park Road Post Production, and additionally supported by Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation and Panavision. _Human was made with kind permission from the Estate of Donald Rodney.

Kunsthalle Basel Night
Wednesday, June 13, 2018, 7–10pm
Experience the solo exhibitions Ultranackt by Raphaela Vogel and _Human by Luke Willis Thompson. For this special evening, Thompson has invited the London-based musician Klein to perform a live concert to accompany _Human. Klein’s aleatory, minimalist soundtrack interprets the weirdly synthesized editing structure of Thompson’s new film.

Live Concert by Klein
Saturday, June 16, 2018, 10:30pm
In collaboration with Art Basel's Parcours Night (which runs 7pm to midnight throughout Basel's historic center), Kunsthalle Basel once again hosts the London-based musician Klein, performing a live concert at 10:30pm to accompany Luke Willis Thompson’s new film _Human.

Curator’s tour
Sunday, June 17, 3pm
A public guided tour in English by the director and curator Elena Filipovic through the exhibitions by Raphaela Vogel and Luke Willis Thompson.

Program through Spring 2019
Sanya Kantarovsky (*1982, Moscow) presents a series of new paintings and monotypes as well as an ambitious new film, his most complex work in animation to date, which gives its name to his first solo exhibition in Switzerland: Disease of the Eyes (August 31–November 11, 2018). 

Zhana Ivanova's (*1977, Russe, Bulgaria) Ongoing Retrospective (Chapter 3) (August 31–September 16, 2018), the latest installment of her cumulative “retrospective in reverse,” features a newly commissioned performative constellation comprised of a script, a film, and live components.

Kunsthalle Basel hosts the annual Kunstkredit Basel-Stadt exhibition (September 23–October 7, 2018), and the Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2017 (October 11–21, 2018).

Tania Pérez Córdova's (* 1979, Mexico City) first institutional solo show in Europe, Daylength of a room (October 26, 2018–January 6, 2019), mines language and time, and questions distinctions between original and copy, in a body of newly commissioned works.

For further information and image requests, please contact press@kunsthallebasel.ch.