Twenty-four galleries from 12 countries, showing works by 27 artists in all, are participating in Art Basel’s Feature section this year. Known for tightly curated solo and group shows, the section draws its share of informed viewers. “Feature at Art Basel is a wonderful way to explore the depth of an artist or specific installation,” said Steve Sacks of New York’s bitforms gallery, which has a booth here this year and also had one in 2013. “The audience that attends this fair has a higher appreciation and aptitude for these focused projects. We expect the same high level appreciation and enthusiasm Art Basel always offers.”
Bitforms focuses on artists who explore new media cultures and processes, and for Basel 2014, Sacks is showing an early example of a multi-channel video work, artist Beryl Korot’s iconic “Dachau 1974.” The note on the work explains some of the ways in which it references history, technology, and human behavior: “The installation ‘Dachau 1974’ focuses on the former concentration camp as a tourist site, as [Korot] found it in 1974. Today this piece is highly regarded in the canon of video art for its powerful framing of place and time, in addition to the installation’s technical and structural rigor. As with many artist’s videos of the 1970s, ‘Dachau 1974’ was a reaction against television.” Also on display is a drawing, titled “Dachau 1974 Graphed representation of 4-channel video work,” and black and white pictographic video notations.
Putting up a solo show of works by Walterico Caldas, which are listed in the $15,000-500,000 price range, the Brazilian gallery Raquel Arnaud can be likened to an attention-grabbing newcomer at Feature. “With a career which spans over 40 years, [Caldas’s] work is grounded in the dialectical experimentation between minimal and conceptual art seen through the destabilizing mediation of perception,” Arnaud said. “Among the several artist books Waltercio Caldas successfully published over the years, ‘Manual of Popular Science’ was probably one of the most influential in the Brazilian art scene in the past 30 years. Originally published in 1982 and recently reprinted in 2007, this little book is a crossroad of references within Caldas’s production.” On display at Basel are several pieces that were reproduced in “Manual.” While the images of some of these pieces were published in the book, until now they had never been displayed together. Arnaud views this as a great opportunity to show the works in relation to each other. Caldas, who has been represented by Arnaud since 1982, helped put the show together.
Another remarkable show comes from Italy — Galleria Raffaella Cortese is one of the few galleries at Feature that is putting up a show featuring works by two artists: photographs by Ana Mendieta and Martha Rosler. “When we discovered that Ana and Martha went together to Cuba for a journey and that Martha had a new printed series of photos related to this trip, everything came quite naturally to conceive the fair concept,” Cortese said. “Rosler’s forty photos are able to narrate a country and at the same time they embody the roots of her next photo series from the ’80s and the ’90s. As for Ana Mendieta, all the works arespecial, as she combines vintage photographs and drawings. We are also presenting the only video she made in Cuba, ‘Ochùn.’ We represent Ana and Martha’s work and it’s a pleasure and a great opportunity to give to these terrific artists more attention in the context of an art fair.”
The booths at Feature seem designed for viewers to gain a sense of the current artistic landscape of different countries and also to provide an insight into diverse artistic interpretations of reality. The curators have suggested the idea of movement and exchange. Not only does this section consider the visual relationships between artistic approaches and the spectator, but also the distinct processes of transmission that facilitate the exchange between the two.
