The international fair for discoveries in contemporary art

Liste Art Fair Basel 2024 announces the 29 edition of the pioneering art fair that aims to champion emerging galleries and outstanding artists while showcasing a younger generation who represent the latest developments and trends in contemporary art.

This year the celebrated art fair that opened its doors for the first time in 1996, will showcase 91 galleries from 35 countries around the globe. There will be 75 solo and 16 group presentations exhibited alongside 5 joint booths resulting in more than 100 differing cultural voices being amplified to an international audience during the fair. Liste is unique in that it is the only art fair where two thirds of the galleries are showing a single artist exhibition resulting in the curating of, over 70 solo exhibitions cementing its position as a pioneering champion of contemporary artists and the art sector.

The galleries planned presentations manifest clearly that in the current art landscape there is a pertinent tendency to explore the complex relationship between humans and the environment demonstrating the sense of urgency to highlight ecological, social and political issues while another key theme resonating with artists includes a reflection on time, memory and transience. Visitors at Liste 2024 will engage with artists who use their practice to explore the ephemeral nature of the human experience and the inevitable confrontation with morality and loss.

Peter Bläuer, Co-Founder, Liste Art Fair, Basel, has managed Liste for 23 years and led it to its great success. This year he has stepped in as artistic director on an interim basis and commented: “Almost every young gallery still applies to Liste and wants to be part of this important platform in Basel. This year, we are once again able to present the most promising new galleries and their artists to an international audience of experts. It makes me very happy to once again work with Stiftung Liste Basel on this important task of helping to promote a future generation of galleries. What could be better than supporting and helping? So, dear experts! take a good look! There is a lot to discover again this year.”

Reto Nussbaum, Commercial Director, Liste Art Fair, Basel 2024, commented: “We took our core task, which is to find the most exciting up-and-coming galleries, very seriously once again this year. With great joy and endless thanks to my team and my co-director Peter, we are looking forward to a fantastic 2024 edition.”

This year Liste will host 23 new galleries who will be exhibiting at Liste for the first time, including Coulisse from Stockholm; Cylinder and P21 from Seoul; Gauli Zitter from Brussels; Longtermhandstand from Budapest; murmurs from Los Angeles; Rele from Lagos; Silke Lindner from New York; sissi club from Marseille; Yutaka Kikutake from Tokyo; and a. Squire, Brunette Coleman and Rose Easton, all from
London.

Special Project:

Every year, Liste Art Fair Basel invites an institution, magazine, artist or curator to conceive a Special Project, which extends Liste’s mission to highlight the latest developments in contemporary art with a cutting-edge approach. This year, Elise Lammer is curating an extensive performance programme titled “Mythic Beings”.

Utopian models once provided artful tools to address society’s ailments through radical thinking. Poetry, fiction and myths were billed as the grammar tasked with establishing an ideal allegorical society. From Christine de Pizan’s literary protofeminism to Octavia E. Butler’s post-apocalyptic Black Renaissance, utopias would fertilise the minds of those ready to spark direct civil action.

In homage to Adrian Piper’s eponymous 1973 work, “Mythic Beings” explores the potential of disguise, camouflage and repetitive action to transcend one’s own condition. Showcasing newly commissioned works by Wren Cellier, Astrit Ismaili, Florence Peake and Luana Vitra, the programme considers some utopias’ blueprints of anti-normative potentials to address art’s transformative function, while simultaneously promoting the idea that artists are the mythic beings embodying revolutionary power.

In their new work, performer, composer and singer Wren Cellier explores how the world’s vulnerability can be expressed through music and sound. Combining singing and live instrument playing with soundscapes of flutes, guitars, voices, effect pedals and field recordings, the work aims to express and make audible the current shift in social ecosystems and how collective transformation can resist norms in order to thwart systems of oppression.

In collaboration with the Institute Art Gender Nature of the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, Astrit Ismaili has been guiding a cohort of fine art students over the course of a few months to develop a new performance exploring the transformational and performative potential of bodies and spaces through a queer lens. Together they researched historical, personal and fictional subjects that, through creativity, overcome certain limitations – whether physiological, social, geopolitical, or other. For the first time, fragments of outcomes from Ismaili’s seminars will be presented to the public. The participating performers are Maria Paz Aires, Delphine Claire Bertrand, Raffaela Boss, Fanny Adriana Dunning, Alex Ghandour, Alyona Hrekova, Ramon Keimig, Léna Lacrabère, Nolan Lucidi, Lisa Mazenauer, Ruowen Mei, Timo Paris, Rondi Park, Alondra Juarez Ramirez, Lunis Finn Riegger, Yann Slattery, Barbara Signer, Thy Truong, Julie/Julot Wuhrmann and Hsiao-Yen Yao.

“Factual Actual” by Florence Peake is an ongoing series of performances and paintings which explore the relationship of painting to movement and propose the overturning of static representations often found in Western museum’s collections. Through chaotic shifts and ever-changing compositions, figurative painting and performance are combined as large, exuberantly painted canvasses are folded, dragged and suspended by Charlie Ashwell, Florence Peake and Eve Stainton, moving between flat and sculptural forms and theatrical elements of concealment and revelation. As part of “Mythic Beings”, Peake will stage a new iteration of “Factual Actual”.

Artist, dancer and performer Luana Vitra investigates the possibilities of drawing by repeating simple gestures while working with extracted minerals. During her residency at La Becque | Artist Residency, Vitra developed a new performance for Liste’s Special Project using iron powder and indigo, further exploring the relationship between her body and the bodies of the minerals while intertwining personal and geological memories. Born in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, where most of the country’s mineral wealth is located, Vitra’s experience with iron has allowed her to observe iron beyond its hardness and to understand its powdered state as the moment of its maximum freedom. 

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