Featured Events in Basel in August 2024 (June Updated)

The exhibition "Paarlauf" was held at the Kunstmuseum Basel to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Im Obersteg collection. The exhibition uses an associative exhibition concept to present artworks from Im Obersteg's private collection and the Kunstmuseum Basel collection, exploring the cross-generational dialogue and imagination of art. The exhibition dynamically rotates exhibits, publicly exhibits Marc Chagall's works on paper for the first time, and invites musicians to record matching tracks for the exhibits, creating a unique dialogue between art and music.

The second exhibition in our Basel gallery is titled ‘Körperlich,’ meaning ‘bodily’ in English. A group show of women artists, the exhibition explores the body’s role in the construction and expression of identity through works by Louise Bourgeois, Maria Lassnig, Meret Oppenheim, Alina Szapocznikow, Irène Zurkinden, Lee Lozano, Hannah Villiger and Carol Rama.

The relationship between mother and child, or between caretaker and infant, has traditionally been represented as a symbiotic fusion within visual art; see the images of virgin and child by Raphael, for example. Inspired by the English psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, this exhibition takes a different view of those early childhood “object relations” that continue to shape how we relate to others throughout our lives. In addition to love and affection, Klein argues, the bond between the baby and its mother is also marked by aggressions, ambivalences, and strong anxious phantasies. The Mother Position brings together artworks that negotiate the complex nature of this paradigmatic object relation, whose long-term consequences resonate throughout. It is precisely because no artistic practice can do without an object relation that the equally libidinal and destructive object phantasies are worth examining. From this perspective, the fact that social interactions are currently often defined by negative feelings, splits, and one-sided repudiations is not only due to social media and the much-invoked “polarization” of contemporary society. Instead, The Mother Position demonstrates that our relations to the external world are also the expression of an inner psychic life that gets projected to the outside (while outside events get introjected). The exhibition thus focuses less on motherhood in the narrow sense than on a psychic position and its object relations that has its starting point in early childhood. It is a position that we keep inhabiting throughout our lives according to Klein. More so: it is a position – and this is The Mother Position’s central argument – that shapes the relationship between artists and their objects in particular.