Exhibition program through summer 2021

Kunsthalle Basel commissions and produces thought-provoking art and exhibitions by emerging artists. Established in 1872, the institution is renowned for its nearly 150-year history of engaging with pioneering practices in contemporary art. The exhibitions planned for 2021 expand on this tradition, nearly all including newly commissioned artworks while supporting artists to create some of their most audacious projects to date.

Lydia Ourahmane: Barzakh
March 2–May 16, 2021

What makes a home? Lydia Ourahmane (* 1992) asks this and countless related questions through the thousands of objects she transported from an Algiers apartment, which she meticulously reorganized from memory and presents together with a series of new sculptures and sound pieces as her first institutional solo exhibition in Switzerland. Hers is, in essence, an inquiry into how histories of displacement and colonial oppression are inscribed upon bodies—a theme recurrent amongst her projects. Here, this questioning takes shape around the ways in which those bodies lay claim to a place while things may lay claim to those who purport to own them. So, too, is it an inquiry into the disciplining of those bodies through the regimes of surveillance and control, of nationalist bureaucracies and borderlines, all of which determine who can call a place “home.”

The result is Barzakh, an exhibition that abides: It waits for you to pass the line of a laser’s lights. It waits for you to speak out loud a private thought, only to be captured by the bugging devices and relayed to someone you don’t know, and can’t see, who may or may not be listening in. It waits for you to sit down and stretch your legs, to let down your guard, to treat her exhibition like home.

The exhibition is supported by the Ernst und Olga Gubler Hablützel Stiftung and is a co-production of Kunsthalle Basel and Triangle-Astérides, Centre d’art contemporain, Marseille, realized with the assistance of gmem-CNCM-marseille and rhizome, Algiers.

Joachim Bandau: Die Nichtschönen: Works, 1967–1974
March 2–June 6, 2021

Joachim Bandau (* 1936) was just over thirty years old when he began to forge the body of sculptures and drawings that marks a distinctive phase in his early practice. In 1967, he had begun to build amorphous, vaguely humanoid forms from mannequin segments slathered with then-new industrial materials and combined with readymade hardware, each sculpture as strange and singular today as when he first created them. By 1974, he announced the abrupt end of this production in order to move into a different direction.

In those few but prolific years, Bandau created artworks of uncompromising force and weirdness. At once technoid and bodily, minimal and monstrous, it is hard to say what they are exactly, even what era they might belong to, not to mention the fact that, if humanoid they are, their sex seems often as obscure as their purpose. “Organoid-technoid hermaphrodites” is what one critic called them at the time.

Kunsthalle Basel rarely stages presentations of historic work. Yet given how topical Bandau’s sculptures and drawings from 1967–1974 are, and how little known they remain, this exhibition features a selection of key pieces from that early period, some rarely or never seen since they were first made, all the better to underscore their urgent need for re-examination today.

The exhibition is generously supported by François Gutzwiller.

Accompanying the exhibition, a richly illustrated catalog will be published in English and German by Kunsthalle Basel with Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König in spring 2021, including extensive historic material and several newly commissioned contributions by Joachim Bandau, Alexandra Bircken, Elena Filipovic, Martin Herbert, and Renate Wagner.

Matthew Angelo Harrison
June 4–September 26, 2021

For his first solo exhibition at a European institution, Detroit-born Matthew Angelo Harrison (*1989) creates an ambitious new body of works defying the scale and expanding the intricacy of the sculptures he has made to date. Bringing together 3-D machine technologies, African artifacts, and workers’ labor union paraphernalia, the results merge the cruel histories of colonialism with the formalist legacy of Minimalism.

The exhibition is generously supported by Martin Hatebur and Lafayette Anticipations – Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris, with additional support from the Rennie Collection, Vancouver, as well as Brook Hartzell and Tad Freese.

Accompanying the exhibition, the artist’s first monograph will be co-published by Kunsthalle Basel and MIT List Visual Arts Center with MIT Press in fall 2021, including a conversation between Taylor Renee Aldridge, DeForrest Brown Jr., and Matthew Angelo Harrison, as well as newly commissioned contributions by Natalie Bell, Jessica Bell Brown, Elena Filipovic, and Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi.

INFORMATION (Today)
June 25–October 10, 2021

Encrypted networks, digital currencies, artificial intelligence, data harvesting: the proliferation of information, and data’s nebulous modes of circulating and being processed, fundamentally shape daily life now. INFORMATION (Today) is a group show seeking to unravel this phenomenon, featuring Lawrence Abu Hamdan, American Artist, Alejandro Cesarco, Simon Denny, Marguerite Humeau, Zhana Ivanova, Tobias Kaspar, Gabriel Kuri, Liu Chuang, Ima-Abasi Okon, Laura Owens, Trevor Paglen, Sondra Perry, Cameron Rowland, Sung Tieu, and Nora Turato.

The exhibition is generously supported by Peter Handschin, the Poncher Foundation, and Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte, with additional support from the Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation and the Dr. Georg und Josi Guggenheim-Stiftung.

For further information and image requests, please contact press [​at​] kunsthallebasel.ch.