INSIDE EUROPE - Art Basel: A Carnival of Lost Dreams

Flags flutter on Basel’s Rhine bridge. A strong wind is blowing over the river, allowing the flags to display their curious content to all passersby. Each displays limbs or other parts of a body, each adorned with text: the sole of a foot with the word «

Foot

note,» a person’s back with the word «Throw

back

,» buttocks with the word «

Arse

nal,» and two female breasts with the word «Or

chest

ra.» The reason the flags are flying: Art Basel opened this week, and the installation by British artist Fiona Banner is one element of a pathway of artworks in the city’s urban spaces that leads directly to Basel’s Messeplatz.

There, the crowds flocking to the world’s most important art fair find that they have themselves become part of a huge painting. Star German artist Katharina Grosse has bathed everything in color: the vast square’s pavement, the fountain, the fountain’s basin, the lampposts and even the facade of the exhibition building. The contrast between the dynamic streaks of red, pink and white paint and the deep green glass of the exhibition tower is breathtaking. Art Basel is once again pulling out all the stops.

Particularly impressive, in the Unlimited hall, is the megashow curated by Giovanni Carmine, director of the Kunsthalle St. Gallen, featuring large-scale installations that would never fit into a normal exhibition. Upon entering, visitors are greeted by a 34-meter-long and over 7-meter-high light display, reminiscent of an old-fashioned carnival.

Multiple identities

The festive light show was created by 48-year-old Italian artist Marinella Senatore, and consists of thousands upon thousands of lights glittering in white, yellow and red. This radiant crown features an inscription: «I contain multitudes,» a quote from 19th century American poet Walt Whitman.

A second inscription reads: «We rise by lifting others,» a quote from American politician Robert Green Ingersoll. He was a well-known speaker in the late 19th century, a prominent representative of the era’s freethought movement and father of women’s rights activist Eva Ingersoll Brown.

With her light installation, Senatore says, she wants to build bridges across social divides and create community through art. Here at Art Basel, at least, it seems she has succeeded. Visitors to the show come from around 90 countries, according to the fair’s organizers. And indeed, there is something exhilarating about moving through this crowd and hearing the babble of languages, like riding a merry-go-round at a fair. Art Basel is a bit like a carnival for modern art – but with a commercial aspect next to all the color.

Senatore’s luminous structure, for example, is being offered for sale by the Turin-based Mazzoleni Gallery for €550,000. All of the works being exhibited here are available for purchase, for considerable sums. As long as such prices are paid by buyers somewhere, the art market will continue to function.

Will business at Art Basel this week suffer due to the globe’s geopolitical uncertainties? These days, art is certainly a welcome distraction from war and crisis. And in a way, this fair in Basel is a kind of dream factory. Here, a visitor can rediscover dreams that seemed lost forever: for example, in an installation that Jaume Plensa calls «Forgotten Dreams.»

His work consists of a narrow passageway lined on both sides with 21 doors cast from aluminum. On these doors, the artist, who was born in Barcelona in 1955, has inscribed all the articles of the
United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948
.

For example, Article 1 states: «All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood.» Article 2: «Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex … »

And so it continues, for a total of 30 articles: «Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.» «Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression.» Are these merely dreams that have been forgotten, as the Spanish artist suggests with the title of his work? His doors to Utopia are firmly closed.

A better world

Another installation serves as a striking reminder of how unattainable paradise seems. It is the largest single installation ever shown at Art Basel. «The Voyage – A March to Utopia» (2025) leads visitors across the entire Unlimited hall, using thousands of different objects to symbolically illustrate humanity’s endless search for a better future.

The enormous installation was created by the Dutch artist collective Atelier van Lieshout from Rotterdam and consists of just about everything humans have ever devised to help them live a better life: from carts, tools, toilets and beds to weapons, laboratories, incubators and operating tables. In addition, there are countless figures: a soldier with a baby in his arms, a begging artist, an astronaut, two tin knights …

Joep van Lieshout, who founded his artist collective in 1995, describes it this way: «This work is about a journey to Utopia, to an unknown place – a better place – a Garden of Eden – a place where we want to find happiness, a place where we want to create a new world.» The caravan is led by the «leader,» as the little red scooter at the front of the procession is called. A model of a hand stretches out hopefully from its footboard.