Summe

Library Making as Practice

Wed, 5.11.25, 17:00 – 20:00

Critical Media Lab Colloquium hosted by distro InfoSpace, on occasion of the opening of two exhibitions on library making as practice.

17:00 – Exhibition openings
18:00 – Talks & discussion

distro
Auf dem Wolf 11, 4052 Basel

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Public libraries are among the last collective infrastructures for accessing and producing knowledge. Yet they are also shaped by histories of inclusion and exclusion – reflecting whose voices are heard, remembered, and valued. In an era of increasingly centralized digital infrastructures and algorithmic gatekeeping, the act of keeping knowledge public – of making books and ideas collectively accessible – has never been more urgent. To defend the library is to defend the possibility of shared, non-commercial, and de-individualized access to knowledge.

The colloquium builds on two exhibitions at distro drawing together a range of tactics and strategies to library making as practice. It brings together artists Nick Thurston, Dušan Barok, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak and Eva Weinmayr, who work with and through libraries to rethink the power asymmetries in the ways how knowledge circulates and how publics are formed.

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Speculative Libraries – Nick Thurston

Nick Thurston approaches library making as an artistic practice – not only as the building of repositories, but as the creation of living systems that organize and connect our shared cultures of production and reception. […]

Library, A Network of Relations: The Piracy Project | Library of Inclusions and Omissions – Eva Weinmayr

Eva Weinmayr discusses tactics and strategies of library making to build knowledge infrastructures that contest enclosures and draw attention to power asymmetries and develop trans*feminist practices of reuse. […]

In a discussion moderated by Stefanie Bräuer, Nick Thurston and Eva Weinmayr will consider library making as a tool for world-building, survival, and path-finding. Drawing on artistic and activist traditions, the conversation explores how libraries can operate as spaces of resilience, resistance, and shared resources.

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🔗 Read more via link in bio @hgkbasel_criticalmedialab.

Shake the World

Fri, 7.11.25, 20:00

by Maria Luisa Pizzighella & Julia Klockow

In this performance, two women shake. At times imperceptibly small and soft, at times ecstatic to the point of violence, at times monotonous to the point of hypnosis. Emotions awaken, energy vibrates in place or seeks an outlet with invasive force. Through vibrations and musical elements, they push against their inner and outer boundaries—their image becomes blurred, yet their field of energy grows all the stronger.

Duration: approx. 30 minutes

@marylpizz @juliaklockow
www.juliaklockow.com
www.instagram.com/juliaklockow/
https://www.instagram.com/marylpizz/

UNBOUND REALMS

27.9 – 2.11.25

Curated by Ileana Ramírez Romero, Unbound Realms draws a speculative cartography of movement, memory, and transformation. Borders – territorial, cultural, biological – are not fixed lines, but shifting thresholds. Inspired by “Lo real maravilloso,” the exhibition suggests a place of transit where the borderline situation becomes a place of becoming.

With works by:
Axel Töpfer & Jo Preußler
Daniela Brugger
Javier Grajales
Joana Amora
Juan José Olavarría
Katherine Newton
Luisanna González QuattriniGrafik von Ira Leon
Raily Yance
Raphael Reichert
Rubén Bañuelos
Suwon Lee
Parque Industrial

Each artist offers a unique approach – through sound cartographies, speculative archives, impossible drawings, silent films, and poetic shifts. They come together to assemble a constellation of practices influenced by the fragility of belonging, migration, and reinvention.

Vernissage: Sat, 27.9, 16.00 – 21.00
Performance by Katherine Newton. Live DJ set by Rubén Bañuelos.

Graphic by Ira Leon

BREAK THE CHARM

25.10.25 – 9.11.25

An exhibition about touch, care, and transformation. With Selina Baumann, Anja Braun, and Diese Frau.

Sat 25.10.25 | 15–18 h
Opening and participatory interaction with Diese Frau

Sat+Sun | 13–17 h
Opening hours

Sun 2.11.25 | 15 h
Dance performance by Marie Jeger in interaction with the exhibition

Sun 9.11.25 | 15 h
Participatory interaction with Selina Baumann and Anja Braun

In the participatory exhibition Break the Charm, the audience is expressly invited to interact with the works. Touching, changing, helping to shape – what is usually prohibited in traditional exhibitions becomes the norm here.

Artists Selina Baumann and Anja Braun from Basel, together with the Berlin collective Diese Frau, have developed an installation space that is constantly changing. A wide variety of materials, performative elements, and sensitive objects create an environment in which art and everyday life intertwine.

Break the Charm questions familiar roles, hierarchies, and boundaries – between work and audience, technology and emotion, care and exhaustion.

RITES OF PASSAGE

26.10.25 – 9.1.25

Photography Exhibition by Thomas Wunsch

Vernissage
Sat, 25.10.25, 17:00, with music by Patrick Joray Trio

Open Hours
Sat and Sun, 11:00 – 17:00

With RITES OF PASSAGE, BelleVue presents an exceptional exhibition that reveals the allure of the unspectacular.
The works of internationally renowned photographer Thomas Wunsch have long been featured on album covers of the Edition of Contemporary Music (ECM) label. In his images, the viewer becomes the central focus: the absence of any clear reference point to what has been photographed leaves ample room for interpretation. This is an essential part of the photographer’s artistic concept — each viewer projects their own imagination onto his creations.

In Thomas Wunsch’s photographs, spaces lose their contours and seem to dissolve. It is the in-between spaces that captivate him – those he “fills” and reanimates through extensive digital processing. Each photo undergoes a meticulous digital transformation, differing significantly from the raw file originally captured by the camera.

While ECM’s record covers are widely recognized, few people know the photographer behind them. Thomas Wunsch, however, emphasizes that he does not work for ECM but as an independent artist. The label’s graphic use of his images represents an additional, positive facet of his practice.

His motifs are found in the most unremarkable places around the world – a streak in a puddle, a scratched wall, a worn floor, a weathered barn door. These experimental photographs, displaying abstract-expressionist structures, form a web of color flows, passages, transitions, and interlacings that challenge the conventions of classical photography.

Since 2000, Thomas Wunsch has devoted himself increasingly to abstract photography. His works have been shown alongside major artists in group exhibitions; he curates, teaches Creative Photography, lectures internationally, and serves on juries worldwide. More than fifty photo books document his creative career. Memberships in renowned institutions such as the MoMA, the Royal Photographic Society, and the International Center of Photography underscore his position in contemporary photography.

RITES OF PASSAGE invites visitors to experience the subtle and poetic visual world of Thomas Wunsch.
www.wunsch-photography.com

Performance and Party Night

Sat, 8.11.25 – Sun, 9.11.25

La Becque | Artist Residency and the art association SALTS celebrate the end of their joint exhibition.

Free before 11 pm, presale 15 CHF, box office 18 CHF

La Becque | Artist Residency and Kunstverein SALTS celebrate the end of their joint exhibition “What Sinks Still Sings” at City SALTS and Kaschemme – featuring a sharing performance by Caroline Ricca Lee and Thi My Lien Nguyen, as well as live and DJ sets by STILL and Palm Wine (Milan, together known as Invernomuto), Low Jack (Paris), Chaos Clay (Geneva), and nightingale (Basel, live).

8 November 2025

City SALTS
Hauptstrasse 12, Birsfelden/Basel:
19:00 Exhibition open & drinks (last days of the exhibition)
20:00 Performative sharing by Caroline Ricca Lee & Thi My Lien Nguyen
20:30 Walk together along the river to Kaschemme

Kaschemme
Lehenmattstrasse 357, Basel:
21:00 La Becque DJs
23:30 nightingale (Live Set)
00:00 Chaos Clay
1:30–4:30 am STILL × Low Jack × Palm Wine

SOAP by Alexandra vom Endt

24.10.25 – 13.11.25

VERNISSAGE:
Thu, 23.11.25, 19.00

PERFORMANCE & WORK DISCUSSION:
Thu, 6.11.25, 19.00

CLOSING EVENT with the artist:
Thu, 13.11.25, 16.00

What does it mean not only to think the world but to experience it physically – through movement, touch, and repetition?
Alexandra vom Endt is interested in the connection between material, memory, and the body. Her work often begins with a gesture: waxed paper is creased, crumpled, folded, or domed. Movements are made visible; boundaries are explored. How much stability is possible before gravity causes large works to collapse in on themselves?

The monotonous process of waxing the enormous sheets of paper unexpectedly catapults the artist back into the past: as a young woman, she stands in her parents’ hotel laundry, guiding damp bed linens into the mangle with outstretched arms, lifting the crumpled fabrics from the wringer, smoothing, stacking, ordering them… Her muscles have stored the repetitive motions; the memory has burned itself into her fingertips. Even today, her skin remains smooth as she handles the wax… faintly, she sees before her mind’s eye piles of laundry outside hotel rooms; is every bar of soap still in its right place?

For the exhibition at DOCK, Alexandra vom Endt revisits these fragments of memory. The presented objects do not depict real situations but rather serve as a meditation on time, memory, and the body’s power to keep the past alive long before we can consciously grasp it. Viewers are invited to create their own associations and to engage with the formal interplay of transparency and the material’s appearance.

For quite some time, the artist has been exploring mechanisms of memory in conjunction with repetitive tasks. She values the meditative aspect that allows her to move fluidly between a critical reflection on current events and the personal sphere. From this ongoing exploration also emerged the eponymous performance that complements the exhibition.

City SALTS: What Sinks Still Sings

26.9 – 14.11.25

La Becque Artist Residency and Kunstverein SALTS present a group show with Invernomuto & Low Jack, Samir Laghouati-Rashwan, Zahra Malkani, Davi Pontes, Ventura Profana, and Caroline Ricca Lee.

VERNISSAGE: Fri, 26.9.25, 18:00

Conceived by La Becque at the invitation of SALTS, What Sinks Still Sings traces a connection between two shores, that of Lake Geneva and that of the rivers Birs. From this dialogue between places, both intimately tied to the two institutions, water emerges as a guiding thread – not simply as a geographical motif, but as a starting point for a broader reflection. In this exhibition, water becomes a metaphor for displacement and unfolds as a current of resonances, reviving memories, divergences, and conflicting narratives.

The participating artists, all of whom are currently or were recently hosted in residency at La Becque, bring their singular research into the exhibition. Through installations, screenings, and shared gestures, they create a shifting constellation where diasporic stories, submerged cosmologies, affective ecologies, and practices of care find a place. Rejecting any univocal reading, their works embrace tension and persistence, composing an archipelago of fragile yet enduring presences.

Curated by Vanessa Cimorelli, What Sinks Still Sings takes shape as a series of ephemeral constellations, welcoming a plurality of memories and narratives, like a song not always heard on the surface, yet resonating in depth.

Against the Rhine

5.10.25 – 16.11.25

Sophie Yerly

Against the Rhine is a group exhibition with the Swiss writer Adelheid Duvanel and Basel-based artist Sophie Yerly. The exhibition space functions as both stage and host: stories arrive in fragments, bounce, linger, and vanish. A sentence is a room—four walls, a ceiling, a floor. Visitors wander through the constructed space. Texts, situations, and borrowed objects mark her work, her stories, the city we inhabit in real time. Traces emerge—hers, ours, and those we never knew we had left behind. No definition, no definitiveness, no homage. Duvanel died in 1996, yet her work lingers with sharp clarity, guiding us through the interplay of reality, memory, and identity.

Against the Rhine is conceived by Sophie Yerly.

Sun, 19.10.25, 16:00 – 18:15
Walk and conversation: Adelheid Duvanel, Far from here, close to you,
With Martina Kuoni and Elsbeth Dangel-Pelloquin. The meeting point will be provided upon registration. Register here.

Sun, 16.11.2025, 13:00 – 18:00
Performances

TO PERFORM AT SINCERELY
A PERFORMANCE OF PERFORMANCES PERFORMED BY PERFORMERS

4.11.25 – 20.11.25

This three-week long performance exhibition presents eight works by different artists and collectives. Expect readings, movements, soundscapes and acts of care and emotion.

Sincerely becomes a stage, a space for experimentation and a place of passage. Enter it in between the clearly announced performances and engage with a constant ongoing documentation. A livestream.
Are you performer or spectator? Or ain’t you both at once at any time?

The aquarium (04.11 – 20.11) offers a room for action doings and observation doings. An ongoing performance performed by everyone inside Sincerely.
A room for performers to perform and viewers to view. Who is who?
Go there and find out.

04.11
18:15 – MMM – Eine Lesung by M&M

06.11
18:30 – walk down the bloodline by ulaş ekin toprak

10.11
17:00 – alternating current by quazar & members of tanz...tanz

11.11
18:15 – soundscapes by quazar

14.11
17:30 – le nourrissage by les mésuriennes

19.11
17:30 – My husband’s cravings by bibiana enasni

20.11
17:30 – emotiononen by juno&micha

04.11 – 20.11
any time – the aquarium – open space & livestream

Exhibition curated by Micha Schweizer

graphics by Elio Rupp

Dear You – Brief shorts by Gin Burri

8.11.25 – 26.11.25

Filmscreening

VERNISSAGE: Fri, 7.11.25, 18.00
19:00: Short film program
20:00: Listening to Letters

Sometimes only letters can express what needs to be felt. The short film program Dear You brings together three works in which writing and voice intertwine.

Between text and voice, we encounter three different figures and their lives: Lézio Schiffke-Rodriguez addresses questions of difference and belonging, political theory, and personal experience as a trans person in his letter Las Mañanitas (2024), written to queer theorist Paul B. Preciado; R.B. Lima’s This is not a Roadmovie (2025) moves through places and memories of a past lover; and Diana Cam Van Nguyen’s Love, Dad (2021) turns to her father through animated photographs – a letter that gently reconsiders a complicated relationship. These intimate archives reveal how closely memory and emotion are intertwined, and how personal stories are always, at the same time, political.

The short film program will be shown as a loop in DOCK’s display window from Saturday, 8 November to Thursday, 27 November. The films will be screened in their original languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Czech) with English subtitles.

Las Mañanitas by Lézio Schiffke-Rodriguez 2024, 11 min, color, OV/e
A letter written to philosopher and trans filmmaker Paul B. Preciado, as one would write to a friend.

It’s not a Roadmovie by R.B. Lima 2025, 18 min, b/w & color, OV/e
As Ulisses recalls a journey to Cape Verde, he writes a farewell letter to Pedro.

Love, Dad by Diana Cam Van Nguyen 2021, 15 min, color, OV/e
The filmmaker rediscovers letters her father wrote to her from prison.

_____

Gin Burri is a freelance philosopher and artistic director of the Lust*streifen Film Festival. They also work as an editor at Stadtkino Basel and write film reviews for various media. Their curatorial work focuses on reflecting on and questioning normative image politics from a queer perspective.

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

7.11.25 – 12.12.25

Open Studio Exhibition

The event presents the works and creative processes of three exceptional artists and offers insights into their methods, inspirations, and unique perspectives.

Follow the creation of artworks over the course of two weekends.

Meet our artists:
Daniel Gutzwiller, Mau Pavón and Agnes Skipper in person.

FRIDAY, 7 NOVEMBER
VERNISSAGE & APÉRO CLUB
17:00 – 21:00

SATURDAY, 15 NOVEMBER
VISIT THE ARTISTS AT WORK
10:00 – 14:00

SATURDAY, 29 NOVEMBER
14:00 ARTISTS AT WORK
15:00 ARTIST TALK
16:00 CAROUSEL PERFORMANCE
18:00 APÉRO

FRIDAY, 12 DECEMBER
18:00 CHRISTMAS DINNER
Registration by 1 December (25.– / all inclusive)
at info@numasigra.com

Galerie NUMAS IGRA
Hochstrasse 70
4053 Basel

www.numasigra.com

Mega Proyecto

8.11.25 – 19.12.25

by Jorge Raka
Text: Charles Benjamin

Opening: Sat, 8.11.25, 17:00

Amore – Gartenstrasse 143 – Basel

T-shirts | Multiples | Accrochage

1.11.25 – 20.12.25

Vernissage: Sat, 1.11.25, 16:00
Open: Sat, 16:00 – 18:00 and by appointment

For more than 25 years, Hebel_121 has been offering T-shirts and multiples for sale in the Front Space during the months of November and December. In the Back Space, an accrochage (group hanging) will feature both in-house works and works by artists from Switzerland and abroad.

2025 – BMG – be my guest – Meret Hanako
“BeMyGuest”

Topics:
Gastauftritt von Meret Hanako im invitro, Holzbildhauerin,
“merethanako”

Context:
“Works with wood”

Material:
Wood, Dog in a box

invitro
Gerbergasse 24, 4001 Basel
niel-thaler.com

LOOPS

30.10.25 – 24.1.26

Katharina Kemmerling & Kris Markiewicz

Vernissage: Thu, 30.10.25, 18:00
Finissage: Sat, 24.10.26, 14:00 – 18:00

Artstübli – Art & Culture, Steinentorberg 28, Basel

Opening hours:
Thu/Fri: 11:00 – 18:00
Sat: 14:00 – 18:00

Loops opens a space of perception in which nature, time, and experience enter into a dense interplay. Katharina Kemmerling and Kris Markiewicz create a multilayered narrative in which moving landscape images, soundscapes, and sculptural forms oscillate between digital reproduction and analog painting. Markiewicz, as a painter deeply rooted in the landscape of the Basel region, collects impressions of light, color, and movement on site and translates them into painted scenes that shift between memory and staging. Kemmerling complements the work through subtly placed installations, sculptural objects, and sound spaces that expand the physical environment and deepen the visitors’ perception.

The exhibition also unfolds in an extended dialogue. The accompanying program – with performances, readings, and sound actions by Laurie Mlodzik, Yanik Soland, and Skelt! – interweaves movement, language, and sound into additional layers of perception, allowing the exhibition to be experienced as a living cycle. It remains a space for reflection, inviting visitors to rethink notions of naturalness, artificiality, and human projection.

Dance Performance by Laurie Mlodzik – Thu, 27.11.25, 18:00

Music Performance by Yanik Soland – Thu, 04.12.25, 18:00

Reading Performance by Skelt! – Thu, 11.12.25, 18:00

Artist Talk – Thu, 22.1.26, 18:00

Regionale 26

30.11.25 – 3.3.26

Wenhao He,
Lizz Keller,
Rose Le Goff,
Arbesa Musa,
Anaïs Strübin,
Ramiro Oller,
Ye Qian,
Ayumi Tomita,
Noémie Vidonne,
Tabea Wasserfall,
Linus Weber

Sixteen years after opening, the Kunstverein is taking part in its first Regionale with City SALTS, a project installed in its garden on the banks of the Birs.

With Wenhao He, Lizz Keller, Rose Le Goff, Arbesa Musa, Anaïs Strübin, Ramiro Oller, Ye Qian, Ayumi Tomita, Noémie Vidonne, Tabea Wasserfall, and Linus Weber. Curated by Samuel Leuenberger & Benedikt Wyss.

Hunter Longe

30.11.25 – 3.3.26

First solo show of the US–Swiss artist in Basel

Incorporating drawing, video, sculpture, sound, and installation, Hunter Longe’s work explores the properties and transformations of the materials it employs. His pieces often include actual elements from the distant past, yet anachronistically evoke time slips and possible futures through their unusual material combinations and speculative character.

Hunter Longe was born in California in 1985 and currently lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland.