Basel CH-4051
Switzerland
Since 1872, Kunsthalle Basel has given artists room to take risks, often at decisive moments in their work. This fall, three exhibitions set three very different temperatures. Gili Tal’s most comprehensive exhibition to date is cool and precise: borrowing the polished language of commercial imagery, it shifts attention from the product to the apparatus that keeps it cold, and to the city built around it. From October 30, Özgür Kar’s Rock Bottom, his first institutional solo exhibition in Switzerland, takes a darker turn, staging a new theatrical production across the Kunsthalle’s rooms in which video becomes sculpture, and each space opens onto a new scene. On the building’s back wall, Samuel Guerrero’s Sol Roto, co-curated with the Barcelona-based art space Cordova, works as an expanded sundial, following the sun through the seasons until next August.
Gili Tal: Light and Airy
August 28–November 15, 2026
Gili Tal's solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel is the most comprehensive presentation of her work to date. At its center stands the commercial refrigerator, a motif that has occupied the artist for years. What began as a readymade sculpture plugged into the gallery's power supply condenses in her new body of work into flat, almost crystal-clear images. In Tal's deliberately distorted rendering of commercial visual language, the gaze shifts from the staged product to the apparatus behind it, and to the ideology of a world that keeps its interior at temperature while heating up its surroundings. The works are complemented by a new series of drawings based on commodities in supermarket brochures and advertising images for new housing developments with their green open spaces.
The exhibition is generously supported by the Isaac Dreyfus-Bernheim Foundation, as well as by Andrea Grisard and Alex Grossenbacher.
The publication is generously supported by the Laurenz Haus Foundation, Basel, where Gili Tal was an artist in residence in 2019.
Özgür Kar: Rock Bottom
October 30, 2026–January 24, 2027
In his multidisciplinary practice, Özgür Kar crosses traditional genre boundaries by combining video, sculpture, animation, and sound into spatial installations. His works circle existential experiences of solitude, longing, and uncertainty. For Kar, video is not a cinematic but a sculptural medium. By bringing together diverse cultural forms such as theatre, animation, and drawing, he condenses opposing emotions into a stripped-down visual language that hovers between the grotesque and tenderness. With Rock Bottom, his first institutional solo exhibition in Switzerland, Kar turns Kunsthalle Basel into the stage for a new production spanning multiple rooms.
The exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel is generously supported by François Gutzwiller, Bilge Ogut-Cumbusyan and Haro Cumbusyan as well as SAHA.
The exhibition has been commissioned in collaboration with Spike Island, Bristol, and Galeria Municipal do Porto / Ágora E.M. and is generously supported by the Mondriaan Fund.
Kunsthalle Basel x Cordova
Samuel Guerrero: Sol Roto
September 13, 2026–August 15, 2027
With Sol Roto, Kunsthalle Basel presents a new commission for public space by Samuel Guerrero. This site-specific installation transforms the back wall into an expanded sundial. Responding to the seasonal movements, it marks the changing course of a year. Drawing on Mesoamerican systems of timekeeping and observation, he investigates time as a social and political structure, making it palpable in the urban realm through light-and-shadow phenomena.
In 2026, Kunsthalle Basel invites Cordova to co-curate the Back Wall Project by Samuel Guerrero.
Kunsthalle Basel’s Back Wall Project is made possible through the generous support of HEIVISCH, with additional support from Institut Ramon Llull, as well as in-kind support from the Stadtreinigung, Tiefbauamt Basel-Stadt.
“Each exhibition this fall shows an artist taking their work further: Gili Tal in scale, Özgür Kar with new figures and his own script and score, and Samuel Guerrero by turning our back wall into a sundial. That is what a Kunsthalle is for: to stand behind artists, and to push them towards the next stage of their work.” – Mohamed Almusibli, Director & Chief Curator.
