Art Basel‘s Parcours sector features site-specific installations, sculptures, and performances in public spaces throughout the city of Basel. This year Parcours moves closer to the fair building and is situated in (empty) stores, and other spaces on Basel’s Clarastrasse between Mittlere Brücke and the Messeplatz. The participating artists are: Rirkrit Tiravanija, James Webb, Kira Freije, Mandy El-Sayegh, Tromarama, Eric Hattan, Lois Weinberger, Anh Trân, Tadáskía, Edith Deyerling, Joanna Piotrowska, Ximena Garrido-Lecca, Moshekwa Langa, Lap-See Lam, Stephanie Comilang, Pol Taburet, Peng Zuqiang, Alvaro Barrington, Eva Koťátková, Iris Touliatou, Nina Canell & Robin Watkins, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster in collaboration with Paul B. Preciado.
Official description: The Parcours sector at Art Basel is a distinctive showcase of site-specific installations, sculptures, interventions, and performances situated in public spaces and historic sites throughout the city of Basel. Curated by a guest curator, Parcours encourages a deeper engagement between the artworks and the urban environment, inviting visitors to explore the city’s rich cultural and architectural heritage while encountering thought-provoking contemporary art pieces that create new dialogues and perspectives.
The 2024 edition of Parcours is curated for the first time by Stefanie Hessler, Director of Swiss Institute New York. For this newly envisioned edition, Art Basel’s free outdoor sector is moving closer to the fair building and Messeplatz. Hessler’s concept for Parcours is a curated exhibition that meanders through empty stores and operational shops, a hotel, a restaurant, a distillery, and other quotidian spaces on Basel’s Clarastrasse. Through ambitious projects, many of them site-specific and newly produced, the sector explores transformation and circulation in processes of trade, globalization, and ecology.
Clarastrasse, the street leading from the fair to the river and connecting the new part of the city with the old town, is currently undergoing rapid transformation that mirrors the changes in the fabric of many locales post-Covid. Leading towards the Rhine, itself a body of water through which globalization and migration have connected and shaped Europe, Parcours’s relocation galvanizes artistic responses to these ongoing processes.
The artists’ projects will explore flows of information and goods as well as seepages between the hyperlocal and the global, suggesting that those are far from uniform movements, but complex, unwieldy, and uneven processes. A number of artists will address ecological systems, the affordances of nature that are exploited through extraction, and increasingly changing climates. Several projects will examine how information circulates and by whom, from traditional forms of storytelling to newspapers to abstraction as a vehicle for spiritual communication and communion. Again others refer to change and knowledge transfers across generations and communities, across time and geographies, through migration, affect, and somatic memory.
Art Basel 2024 Parcours Sector. Basel (Switzerland), June 15, 2024.
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