Imagine a museum exhibition that invites you to have a nap, smoke a cigarette and drink a negroni while the art around you is sporadically rehung, a sweet potato cooks in a microwave and every so often you are enveloped by a thick fog.
It sounds like an art student’s project, but it is in fact the current exhibition at Basel’s Fondation Beyeler, renowned for its rich collection of heavyweight Modernists and recent landmark shows of Mondrian, Picasso and Basquiat. Purists might balk, but what could have come across as an amateurish experiment — including a title that changes throughout its 12-week run — instead makes conceptual art accessible, delightful even, without resorting to easy entertainment.
It succeeds for two reasons. First, because most of the 30 artists involved are among the brainiest and best-known in their fields today. They were also involved in organising the show, alongside curators such as Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of Serpentine Galleries, and Paris-based Mouna Mekouar.
Their vision, in partnership with the forward-thinking Luma Foundation, has hatched some thought-provoking new works. Rirkrit Tiravanija, an artist who explores social interaction, reminds us of the need to pause by converting the foundation’s small terrace into a negroni bar and slow-cooking kitchen called the Old Smokey Lounge. Adrián Villar Rojas provides the microwaved sweet potato as the basis of a supersized sculpture of hybrid organic and man-made forms developed within an AI-powered world (another of his works emerges from a whirring washing machine).
The offer of a bed, which can be booked by the hour or overnight, comes courtesy of Carsten Höller, who once filled Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with an adult playground to investigate how thought and sensation interact. At the Beyeler, he has worked with a dream scientist to make a transformative, if not necessarily restful, sleep on a motorised bed surrounded by suspended mushrooms that seem to fly under a red light.
The second reason for the show’s success is that it plays with the enviable raw material of the foundation’s collection, manipulated by Tino Sehgal, famed for his transient projects where he creates situations that disrupt familiar contexts, notably in museums and galleries. At the Beyeler, he has chosen more than 70 pieces to rehang and reposition, with some unexpected live action from staff moving the works during opening hours, leading to jaw-dropping juxtapositions.
When I visited in mid-June, these included one room in which the pink panels of Francis Bacon’s weighty triptych, “In Memory of George Dyer” (1971) had been separated — an iconoclastic act — with each part placed flush against crumpled canvases by Rudolf Stingel, unremarkable works from 2019 that are successfully elevated. Alberto Giacometti’s “Large Standing Woman” bronzes (1960) were choreographed to look at the display.
But they might not be there every day, given Sehgal’s plan. Alternative hooks are visible on the walls while a museum truck, used to carry work around the building, sits in the exhibition rooms ready for action. I witnessed tightly packed works by Marlene Dumas and Wilhelm Sasnal being switched around.
There are some understandable conservation concerns about moving fine art around at an accelerated pace but such issues have been “at the centre of all decisions”, says Sam Keller, director of the Beyeler. Fragile paintings are not included in the dancing displays, he says, adding that “the exhibition has already run for several weeks without problems”.
Tickets to the show include a second visit to encompass a different experience. The exhibition I saw was called Dance with Daemons, its name during the opening days of the Art Basel fair, but later in the week it became Echoes Unbound. There are 16 to rotate through, inviting the question of how much the trappings of titles and display affect a museum visit. Works are not labelled — though thankfully there is a detailed guidebook to take around, for those less au fait with conceptual constructs and the canon of art history.
The inside of the sublime Renzo Piano-designed building proves the most powerful part, but the Beyeler’s grounds offer some treats too. These include a greenhouse full of strongly smelling plants and tropical butterflies, a work by the poet-artist Precious Okoyomon. This is not a botanical-garden jolly: the plants are all in some way poisonous (with toxicity that ranges from “mild to deadly”, the guidebook tells us); the butterflies hatch and die; and at one end of the greenhouse lies a large, animatronic teddy bear, in frilly knickers that occasionally wakes from its slumber to scream. The work is called “the sun eats her children” (2024).
It is hard to unify the works on show, but some contemporary preoccupations come through. Many of the artists, including Höller, have a grounding in science. “Membrane 2” (2024), a tower by Philippe Parreno which resembles a clunky, rather unsafe, fairground ride, is embedded with sensors that detect and replay stimuli from its surroundings, extending even to the ducks in the Beyeler’s pond.
The California artist Ian Cheng, also an expert in video-game engine software, brings an anime film based on a mutating creature called Chalice (“Thousand Lives”, 2023-24). Both works rely on gathering user data to affect environments and raise issues around AI. They prompt the uncomfortable question that extends from Sehgal’s creations too: to what extent to can real-life activity be simulated?
Other works activate areas of the museum that might go unnoticed, in keeping with a trend towards less hierarchical constructs. These include a work by the discombobulating Dozie Kanu, who places found, often modified objects, such as medical instruments or a fan in chains, in display cases within the museum’s cloakroom.
The mysterious fog, a new work by Fujiko Nakaya, who has created more than 70 such environments that she calls sculptures, helps to unify the potentially disparate projects. Emerging from a sophisticated pump system outside the building, it can entirely cloud the Beyeler’s grounds. The fog proves just as powerful from inside, suffocating the building and forcing a pause that leaves visitors with only their own thoughts about what they are experiencing rather than seeing. As such, it manages to reveal the point of this brave exhibition, whatever its title that day.
To August 11, fondationbeyeler.ch
