Janiva Ellis: Geneva / Shuang Li: Alliance

Artists of tomorrow, on view today.

With Janiva Ellis and Shuang Li, Kunsthalle Basel presents two first institutional solo exhibitions in Europe. Ellis brings eleven new paintings to Basel, moving through the canonical languages of art history with a wit and urgency that is entirely her own. Li premieres her most expansive film to date in an immersive installation, reframing the pursuit of extreme weather as a lens on the digital forces shaping contemporary life. Together, the exhibitions ask what becomes visible when you press against inherited structures from within.

Janiva Ellis: Geneva
May 1–August 9, 2026

Janiva Ellis’s first institutional solo exhibition in Europe opens with a dialogue across eleven paintings made specifically for this occasion. The works incorporate representational imagery and abstraction, moving through contradictions and complexities.

Three threads traverse the exhibition: the religious, the landscape, and the erotic. Each carries a long association to painting and has been renegotiated repeatedly throughout art history. Ellis works her way through the existential questions that European art history has passed down as universal and unavoidable. These are not mere subjects but inherited, canonical structures of meaning that the artist inhabits and metabolizes, laying bare what they keep silent. Language runs through the work in a similar way: it can hold meaning together but also allow it to drift apart, thus revealing simultaneously what the act of naming omits.

What rises to the surface in each painting may at first glance appear to be the final layer, but it is in fact the most recent state of something that has been reworked over time. Earlier decisions lie beneath the surface, gestures that have been revised, erased, or covered over. Ellis’s process accumulates in layers, drawing motifs from digital images, archives, and chance encounters. Her paintings move across several different registers at once, technical and cartoonish, monumental and oblique, with the comic and the catastrophic remaining in close proximity without necessarily explaining each other.

The exhibition is made possible with generous support from the LUMA Foundation, Peter Handschin and Martin Hatebur, Tul w Ard, as well as Jackson Tang and George Freeman.

Shuang Li: Alliance
June 12–September 13, 2026

Shuang Li examines how digital technologies shape relationships, bodies, and desire. Through videos, performances, and installations, she investigates the entanglements of humans, media, and the infrastructures of the digital world. In her first institutional solo exhibition in Europe, Li premieres her most expansive film to date, presented within a specially conceived immersive installation. The starting point is her engagement with extreme weather phenomena and the practice of "storm chasing," the targeted pursuit and observation of severe weather events such as tornadoes and hurricanes. This impulse toward the storm extends into the exhibition space itself. The rooms become the foundation of a road that stretches through heightened, almost overexposed landscapes, passing weather forecasts and meteorological maps displayed like oversized billboards along the roadside.

Positioned within the global networks where climate volatility, algorithmic systems, and capitalist extraction operate beyond borders, Li reframes storm chasing as a potent metaphor for navigating the swirling forces that define life in the digital age. Through this new film installation, she searches for ruptures within boundless systems of control, inviting audiences from diverse contexts to envision futures that move beyond the flattening logics of surveillance capitalism and technological determinism.

The exhibition is generously supported by Cc Foundation, Octone Foundation, and Simian Foundation, with additional support from Esther Maria Heer-Zacek. 

The exhibition brings together a series of co-commissions and partnerships with JD Museum, Shenzhen, CN; Yenn and Alan Lo Foundation, Singapore, SG; Busan Biennale, Busan, KR and CHERUBY, Shanghai, CN.

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.