Organisers of the satellite fairs, ever eager to distinguish their shows from the rest, are hosting events throughout the week that emphasise the focus of each fair. These range from Liste’s Performance Project, now in its 11th year, to Photo Basel’s inaugural exhibition Drive In, for which the curator Esther Woerdehoff, in association with Zurich’s Bildhalle, has chosen images celebrating and critiquing car culture.
Here is our pick of the satellite fairs’ special projects:
Liste (16-21 June) celebrates its 20th birthday this year. Based at the former Warteck brewery, the fair again includes Performance Project, which this year is being organised by the curator Eva Birkenstock. The programme includes performances by Ieva Miseviciutė, Jeremy Wade and Egle Budvytyte, among others. Under the title Passing Peaks: a Series of Performative Individuations, each work examines what makes every person unique. The artists included “are all very conscious of how their predecessors and role models were concentrating on the figure of the modern subject”, Birkenstock says. But they share “a different conception of the self that emanates from experiments on one’s own body, and a shared interest in the layering of various references”. The performances take place at the brewery and around Basel from 15 June.
At Design Miami/Basel (16-21 June), the hotelier and collector André Balazs has organised an exhibition of four, full-scale installations of modular architecture by Jean Prouvé, Edouard François, Shigeru Ban and Atelier Van Lieshout. “There is a long tradition of this kind of work,” Balazs says. “There is nothing new about this technology or the impulse to make transportable shelter. What makes it interesting now is that the dynamics of the art market have led to a sudden interest in what used to be low-cost, efficient manufacturing. It has suddenly been elevated to the realm of collectable work. I don’t think this would have happened four years ago.”
On show are Prouvé’s 1969 prefabricated petrol station, and François’s Flower House (2015), a sustainably designed building with a gold façade. Ban is represented by his 2006 Paper Tea House, made of cardboard tubes, honeycombed cardboard and Japanese paper. Atelier Van Lieshout’s contribution is Poolhouse (2015), a family home that includes a bar and a children’s play area.
Opening the first edition of Photo Basel (17-20 June) is Drive In, an exhibition exploring the theme of car culture which includes work by René Burri, Simone Kappeler, René Groebli, Sam Shaw, Elliott Erwitt and Xavier Lambours. Around 60 photos taken between the 1950s and 2014 will be on display. “It is interesting to see how people’s relationship to cars has totally changed in 60 years. Cars have became smaller and are used more as a means of transportation, and no longer a kind of new home, or living-room for some people,” says the curator Esther Woerdehoff, who owns an eponymous Parisian gallery and who has already staged iterations of the Euro-centric show in Paris, Ljubljana and Zurich.
The art book fair I Never Read (17-20 June), entry to which is free, includes more than 100 exhibitors, among them the Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art from Rotterdam and Sternberg Press from Berlin. The co-organiser Eveline Wüthrich says: “The fair examines the field of art and books, which we think was something that was missing during the fair week [previously] in Basel.”
Among the various events is a book launch for the artist Adam de Neige’s Beneath the Flow (2015). This book accompanies his current show in Venice, for which the artist sank his own work into the city’s lagoons.
I Never Read also has a radio station that will broadcast programmes, including a performance by the artists Annie Vigier and Franck Apertet (6.30pm, Wednesday) and a lecture by the artist Martin Chramosta (7pm, Thursday). Book signings will be held throughout the week.
For the opening of Volta, at 2.30 pm on 15 June (fair runs until 20 June), the Danish-Trinidadian artist Jeannette Ehlers is due to perform her project Whip It Good, which she has previously taken to venues including the Royal College of Art in London. A film of the performance, in which Ehlers lashes a white canvas with a bullwhip covered in charcoal, will then be on view at the booth for her Copenhagen- based gallery, LARMgalleri.
The special project at Scope (16-21 June) this year is called Paper View and is organised by the writer A. Moret, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Installation Magazine, the digital contemporary art review. Ten artists who work with paper (Simon Schubert, Hollis Hart, S. Astrid Bin, Andreas Kocks, Annie Vought, Kustaa Saksi, Cristina Parreño, Christophe Piallat and the design collectives Orproject and Visualpilots) will create collages and sculptures using this medium. Each has also created a print edition of images to be featured on Scope tote bags. One of the artists will be chosen to create a site-specific installation at Scope’s Miami edition in December.