May/June 2016 program

Sam Lewitt: More Heat Than Light
through May 29
Interrogating flows of information and capital through the global economy drives much of Sam Lewitt’s (b. 1981) oeuvre. In More Heat Than Light, the artist reroutes Kunsthalle Basel’s electrical current used for lighting to instead create heat, thereby disrupting one of the exhibition space’s primary operations. This detour in the infrastructure of an institution that is meant to put things “on exhibit” thus exchanges optimal visibility for thermal inefficiency. The exhibition is an unstable thermo-regulating machine, with Lewitt’s custom-made, flexible, ultrathin heating circuits literalizing the artist’s idea that “an artwork can determine its site: really structure it and not just aesthetically activate it.” Wires dangle from the ceiling, transferring power from the gallery’s lighting grid to the copper-clad plastic heaters that in turn create only as much heat as the lighting grid will “feed” them. They are accompanied by texts, digital sensors, and a thermal camera that registers the temperature of the heaters and of visitors’ bodies, staging a confrontation between flexibility and enclosure, phenomenological experience and quantifiable data. A study in circulation, consumption, institutional infrastructure, and, importantly also, trust, More Heat Than Light is Lewitt’s first institutional solo show in Europe.

Workshop: “The Whole Cool System”
March 27, 10am–6pm, organized by eikones
“The Whole Cool System” workshop will take place at the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) Iconic Criticism, with a visit to Sam Lewitt’s exhibition More Heat Than Light at Kunsthalle Basel. The workshop focuses on how art can engage, critique, or articulate the mechanisms of entanglement of information systems with the production of social life. Participants include Simon Baier, Sebastian Egenhofer, Devin Fore, Sam Lewitt, André Rottmann, and Felicity Scott. For more information visit www.eikones.ch.

Yngve Holen: VERTICALSEAT
May 13–August 14
Opening: May 12, 7pm
The body, it is often said, is conspicuously absent from Yngve Holen’s (b. 1982) work. Everywhere in his oeuvre, however, the implications of the body—in all its subjectivity, messy corporeality, and imbrications in a culture of consumption—are evoked. This is visible in his persistent exploration of the technologies that define our everyday surroundings, from transportation and plastic surgery to food. For his largest institutional show to date, the Norwegian-German artist presents an array of new sculptures that magnify this questioning. They reveal an idiosyncratic material bias and a fascination with specific, mundane objects: glass hand-blown to evoke talismans cut into the shape of Boeing Dreamliner windows, readymade barriers and plastic medical imaging parts positioned like paintings, autobus headlights gleaming anthropomorphically, and even the ultimate object of desire for the nuclear family that also craves luxury and speed, the Porsche Panamera. Here, industrial objects, almost inhuman in their futuristic sheen, are sliced open, or re-presented in ways that raise questions about how humans and the human-made reconfigure each other in an age of technological acceleration. Featuring several major new commissions and a collaborative project between Holen and Aedrhlsomrs Othryutupt Lauecehrofn (b. 1986), the exhibition highlights Holen’s different approaches to thinking about the object and its absent but implicit human users.

Publication launch: ETOPS III
June 14, 7pm
Reception and launch for the new issue of ETOPS (Extended Operations), Yngve Holen’s magazine edited with Matthew Evans and designed by Per Törnberg about specialized industries today. Issue 3 is a travelogue about food and political ecology in the Amazon rainforest and the Andes.

Anne Imhof: Angst
June 10–August 21
Opening: June 9, 7pm with a performance
Anne Imhof (b. 1978), recent winner of the Preis der Nationalgalerie 2015 for young artists, presents an audacious new commission that combines her interests in performance, painting, and installation with a live element that will extend over the duration of the exhibition. Here, Imhof presents the first act of an “opera” of sorts composed by the artist in several acts and constructed through a choreography of cryptic gestures, an abstract musical composition, and sculptural elements. The opera’s various characters—which ephemerally appear, occasionally coincide, and leave traces of their presence in the exhibition—are played by amateur and formally trained performers. Each has a name, as in the Lover, the Diver, the Rope Dancer, the Spitter, or the Prophet (played by a live falcon). Together they continuously form and un-form what could be called the “images” that make up the piece and give sense to the enigmatic sculptural scenography that forms their backdrop. The whole expands on Imhof’s signature vocabulary and materials, from her exploration of task-like movements and acceleration to her frequent use of dripping liquids and branded comestibles, like Pepsi or Orbit gum. In the process, Angst, true to the artist’s larger practice, troubles the boundaries of the body, time, and the fleeting images created between them.

Special extended performance times (during Art Basel)
June 15, 6pm–12am
Spread over six hours, Angst, act 1 of Anne Imhof’s exhibition-as-opera, will reach a pinnacle with all of its 11 characters appearing together.
June 18, until 12am
A special viewing of Angst as part of Art Basel’s Parcours Night
Additional performance times announced on the website.

Supporters
Sam Lewitt’s More Heat Than Light is co-organized with the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco. The exhibition is generously supported by Regent Lighting and Roldenfund, as well as Thea Westreich and Ethan Wagner.

Yngve Holen’s VERTICALSEAT is made possible by the lead support of the LUMA Foundation. Lafayette Anticipation, Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette supported an ambitious artwork that will be part of the exhibition and also technically oversaw its complex production. VERTICALSEAT is also supported by the Gaia Art Foundation, the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Bern, and the Office for Contemporary Art Norway. The publication project ETOPS III is made possible by Hessische Kulturstiftung; its launch is co-organized with the Royal Norwegian Embassy, Bern.

The opera that forms the basis of Anne Imhof’s Angst is co-produced by Kunsthalle Basel and the Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin supported by the Freunde der Nationalgalerie with the collaboration of La Biennale de Montréal. The exhibition benefits from the generous support of Martin Hatebur, the Rudolf Augstein Stiftung, the Isaac Dreyfus-Bernheim Stiftung, and ValeriaNapoleoneXX.

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