Nilbar Güres, Elsewhere's Palm Trees, 2012–2018 (Videostill)

The Time Needs Changing questions our geo-politically controlled notions of time. The three artists in this show give alternatives to linear time, which is currently strictly enforced by the power structures under which we live.

The works of Cao Fei, Nilbar Güreş and the Raqs Media Collective release the shackles of time, and suggest alternative and parallel paths. The exhibition presents a thought-scape that draws from three different parts of the world; China, Turkey and India. The artists explore time through drawing, video, photography, installation and new media.

Time is one of the many subjects addressed by the participants of the exhibition. Their works help us better understand our relations with ourselves, as well as those with the world around us. Nilbar Güreş questions masculine linear time; Cao Fei offers us greater control in a world where real and virtual intersect; and the Raqs Media Collective liberates time itself in [...]

Roman Ondak, Fail to Fall, 2010 (Detail)

This exhibition will not present photography as a useful, fast recording medium, "a document of the period", or as an instrument of digital manipulation, but as a tool that is suitable for a wide range of use in contemporary art. In their response to the digital technology era, artists use the photo medium much more freely but in a more sophisticated way. Appropriated documented reality is constructed, arranged, staged anew, but with the use of purely photographic methods and classical approaches.

The collection will focus on events in the past 10 to 15 years, examples of artistic techniques and strategies within the wide spectrum of possibilities of this medium. It will also take into consideration a relatively new phenomenon - the impact of foreign training and long-term stays on the work of Slovak artists.

This exhibition strives to help visitors to perceive not only the direct usefulness, broad use and abuse of photography, but to focus - as if in slow motion - [...]

Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck, UNstabile-Mobile, from the series Modern Entanglements, U.S. Interventions, 2006
Installation detail at Met Breuer, New York. Photo: Amy Rosenblum-Martín 

Bringing together 17 artists and collectives from the region and beyond, Crude explores oil as an agent of social, cultural and economic transformation across the Middle East and North Africa, as well as a driver of geo-political upheaval. Oil has been a trigger for misguided colonial adventures, wars and coups; a catalyst for nation building, modernisation and development; and a cause of terrible ecological disasters. Oil, and its attendant industries and economies, has produced a spectrum of representations—architectures and infrastructures, documents and records, plans and photographs, and image and artifacts—that bring alive these complex histories. Much of the historical material lies buried in various national, corporate and media archives.

This exhibition features the works of contemporary artists that engage with the oil industry’s murky archives and histories, narrating an alternate and episodic material history of modernity in [...]

Tania Pérez Córdova, Even, 2017 (Detail)

Tania Pérez Córdova (*1979) makes an art of turning ordinary materials into conceptual sculptures. In her first institutional solo show in Europe, the Mexican artist prepares an exquisite, minimal installation in the upper skylight galleries that mines distinctions between original and copy, the authentic and the ersatz through a body of newly commissioned works.

Kunsthalle Basel

Exhibition view, Boesky Gallery 2018. Photo by Object Studies

The exhibition Crescendo will feature a new body of paintings that captures Deininger’s fluid manipulation of color and form, resulting in complex compositions that arise organically as she works the canvas. Driven by both formal inquiry and a deep understanding of physical environment, Deininger will create a holistic experience. 

Deininger approaches each exhibition as a distinct moment in time, following a single conceptual thread or inkling until it completes in a discrete body of work. In this way, Deininger is much like a composer, weaving together gesture, color, and line to create an intricacy of texture and rhythm, with each painting bringing a singular note and weight to the overall experience. Suspended between abstraction and figuration, her canvases evoke a range of seemingly intangible sensations—a fleeting dream, a spark of memory, the indiscernible outlines of a place, or an emotion lost but newly felt. These evocations are [...]

The group exhibition Klassenverhältnisse – Phantoms of Perception deals with narratives of class affiliation, decline and social differences that are constantly present in public perception as rarely articulated phantoms and features artists whose works compel us to rivet on such interrelations that lie outside of our conscious field of vision, although they crucially determine the way we perceive social coexistence.

The starting point of the exhibition Klassenverhältnisse (Class Relations) and at the same time an invitation to rediscover an outstanding cinematic work less well known in Germany is Klassenverhältnisse of the French filmmaker couple Jean-Marie Straub (*1933) and Danièle Huillet (1936-2006) from 1984, a film adaptation of Franz Kafka's novel fragment The Missing Person, shot in Hamburg. The film tells the story of young Karl Roßmann who searches for but fails to find his place in society. [...]