At Liste Art Fair Basel 2023, Emerging Artists Fuse the Personal and the Political

On a sweltering Monday in June, the first artwork that VIP guests to Liste Art Fair Basel saw upon entering was a room of large dripping ice blocks, suspended by ropes above porcelain bowls and accompanied by a contemplative soundscape. The installation In Curved Water (2010), by Tomoko Sauvage, part of the fair’s “Whistlers” special exhibition, is an apt commentary on climate change and encapsulates this fair’s commitment to boldness.

Founded in 1996 by Eva Presenhuber and Peter Kilchmann, Liste’s track record of showcasing emerging art speaks for itself. Several major gallerists—from David Zwirner to Stephen Friedman, and Massimo DeCarlo—exhibited here during its early iterations, and this year’s edition was another showcase of the organizers’ flair for experimentation.

Liste is a truly global affair, featuring 88 galleries from 35 countries, 20 of which are showing here for the first time. Located in Hall 1.1 of Messe Basel center, next door to Art Basel, it is by no means a small fair (even if it is dwarfed by the scale of its larger neighbor), but the feeling here is approachable, talkative, and even intimate. Booths are arranged in a circular formation in its main hall, which, on VIP day, prevented the fair from feeling overly crowded, while retaining a lively buzz.

“The galleries really bring their most exciting presentations to Liste because there is a spirit of doing that,” said Hormoz Hematian, founder of Iranian gallery Dastan, which is presenting a joint booth of vibrant works by Yousha Bashir and Rana Dehghan that explore notions of the self. It’s one of several subjects that emerge from the fair, which has a stated theme of “my gaze, your gaze: the importance of positionality.”

More than 100 artists are featured at the fair, which consists mainly of solo booths. From technological anxieties to climate change, politics, and the body, the works here touch on these ideas in striking, interesting ways. “We’re noticing a sharply observant generation of artists who are increasingly using time-based media such as video, sound, scent, and performance to make sociopolitical statements. Art is becoming more political again,” said Joanna Kamm, the fair’s director.

The intersection of the political and personal is perhaps the strongest thread running throughout the fair. At Hong Kong–based Blindspot Gallery’s solo presentation, Isaac Chong Wai traces a line between collectivism and individualism, and nationalism and postcolonialism, through striking photography, glass sculpture, and video works. The artist uses his breath to create distinctive brushstroke-like marks in the photographic print and glass sculpture Breath Marks: Queen Elizabeth II and Crying Hong Kong Girl (2023). An earlier video work, Neue Wache (2015), shows the artist looking through a window at the façade of Neue Wache memorial in Berlin, breathing on the glass and continuing the theme of fragility in the face of political upheaval.

It’s one of several video installations that invite visitors to engage with booths in a more patient way. At Shanghai’s Vanguard Gallery, for instance, the booth is converted into a film set by Tang Chao, who melds the graphic languages of analog and digital to explore the convergence of physical reality and simulation. The gallery’s founder Lise Li Li told Artsy that the artist had been thinking about COVID, and the rapid development of technologies such as AI when making the project. “It talks about emotions,” she said. “Even if you don’t use the technology or AI, you’ll still feel something around it.”

Around the corner, another standout video work, mother may recall another (2022) by Mira Mann, takes center stage in Cologne gallery DREI’s affecting solo booth. The three-channel work revolves around the story of a young orphan girl who offers herself to the sea, hoping to restore her blind father’s vision. The video is accompanied by other items related to the video, including a poem by the artist’s mother, gelatin prints, and a makeup mirror.

While video works are widespread, there is no shortage of wall pieces at Liste (even if there is a notable lack of figuration here compared to other fairs). Other, non-video highlights at the fair include Ukrainian gallery The Naked Room’s solo presentation of Anna Zvyagintseva, which covers eight years of the artist’s career and touches on issues of bodily experience, fragility, and, in recent works, the war with Russia. The 2015 series “Order of Things” depicts iron bar reinforcements, which appear to disintegrate onto a plinth below. “It documents a reflection about the nature of the image today, and how the image collapses and crumbles in front of our eyes,” said the gallery’s partner Liza German.

At Belgian gallery Super Dakota, standout works by four artists center around “technology, and the different emotions and aspects, conversations that can come out of it,” explained the gallery’s director Shesna Lyra Conrado. Paintings by Chris Dorland reference data scraping in vigorous fashion, while those by fellow Canadian Danica Lundy capture a woman at a sink in an intimate moment. Dutch artist Janne Schimmel, meanwhile, has reconfigured hardware and software into cyborg-like sculptures, including a playable, deconstructed Game Boy.