Diambe: Bees beings beans / Dominique White: All Great Powers Collapse from the Centre

With Diambe and Dominique White, Kunsthalle Basel presents two exhibitions that investigate the conditions under which material and political systems are tested and begin to change. While Bees beings beans focuses on processes of accumulation and renewal, All Great Powers Collapse from the Centre interrogates collapse as something that unfolds from within. Together, the exhibitions trace the continuum between horizon and wreckage, structure and dissolution. From the shorelines of the Atlantic to its submerged debris, the works offer distinct perspectives on endurance and survival.

Diambe: Bees beings beans
January 23–April 12, 2026

In Bees beings beans, Diambe begins with a seemingly pure and simple material: beeswax. However, in the artist’s hands, it turns into something else entirely. It softens, melts, resists, remembers. It presents a way to reflect on transformation, about how forms hold together or fall apart, and about the silent force of matter as it moves through time or across temperature scales.

The exhibition's architecture follows the logic of a beehive. Sculptures rest on modular, honeycomb-like platforms. Visitors move among them, pause, and regroup, like a swarm responding to signals it doesn't fully understand. In a central video, two beeswax sculptures are coated in sugar syrup and left in a field. A swarm arrives. Slowly, over time, the figures are hollowed out and collapse. What appears to be a ruin is simultaneously a testament to the emergence of something new.

Surrounding these sculptural moments are paintings that fold in sacred landscape traditions. Seeds,  market scraps, and traces of trade circulate across them, pointing to longer histories of movement, extraction, and survival. Bees beings beans does not attempt to explain these systems. The exhibition dwells in them, holding together matter and memory, climate and city, bodies, and the forces that shape them.

Bees beings beans is supported by La Becque | Artist Residency, with additional support from the Embassy of Brazil in Bern.

Dominique White: All Great Powers Collapse from the Centre
February 13–May 17, 2026

Dominique White transforms the galleries of Kunsthalle Basel into a series of charged environments with her sculptures. Moving through All Great Powers Collapse from the Centre evokes the feeling of submersion. The space carries the weight of water, as if walking along an ocean floor where orientation shifts and measures begin to dissolve. What appears are not intact objects but remnants. These are fractured bodies and broken structures, shaped by corrosion and bearing the marks of rupture. They resist classification. They resemble evidence of a collapse that has already begun.

At the center of this exhibition is the figure of the ship. Not a single vessel, but a shifting and layered form. The ship emerges as a motif of organized power, extraction, movement, and border-making. It is a warship, cargo carrier, asylum seekers’ vessel, colonial transport, and a space-faring rocket. It is a machine that updates itself continuously, always adapting to new regimes of control.

The exhibition unfolds like a threshold space, a kind of shoal. It is a zone where currents collide and where surfaces abrade. It marks the meeting of sea and land, of violence and escape, of the sublime and the threatening. In this space, movement slows and stability becomes precarious. Directions are no longer fixed. The ship, once a structure of containment and direction, begins to fail. Its breakdown is not clean. It draws the whole system into disarray. The hunger that once drove it turns inward. Collapse begins at the centre: the machinery of extraction starts to grind through its own interior, making the hold, built to contain and manage life, the site where the system devours what keeps it afloat.

With its 2026 program, Kunsthalle Basel reinforces its commitment to bold voices that confront the social, cultural, and perceptual questions shaping our time. Across the year, each exhibition invites our audiences into spaces of critical reflection, where new forms of dialogue and perception can emerge.