Parcours in Art Basel to explore clash between art, man and urban ecologies

New Delhi/Hong Kong, June 7, 2014  

An array of site specific installation, Parcours, will be on the top of the list of new-age site-specific art at Kleinbasel during Art Basel 2014, one of the most prestigious showcases of contemporary art in Europe. 

The art show will begin in Basel, located on the border between Germany and Switzerland, from June 19-22. More than 300 leading galleries from Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia and Africa will exhibit a wide range of works across genres spanning — paintings, sculptures, installations, videos, multiples, prints, photography and performances. Parcours will be sited at various locations around the Rheingasse in Kleinbasel featuring a total of 15 site-specific art works by internationally-recognised artists, Francesco Arena, Darren Bader, Gottfried Bechtold, Pierre Bismuth, Jean Luc Blanc, Chris Burden, Ryan Gander, Mario Garcia Torres, Mark Handforth, Iman Issa, Joao Penalva, Seth Price, Eva Rothschild, Guido van der Werve and Zeng Fanzhi, officials said in Hong Kong.             

The site-specofic works will try to engage with Basel’s past and present by weaving artistic interventions into the fabric of the specific location, each edition inhabits. Florence Derieux, director of FRAC, Champagne-Ardenne, will curate Parcours for the second year. The sector will open to the public with Parcours Night on Wednesday, June 18, and include special one-off performances by Guido van der Werve and Mario García Torres. The works will be bound by threads of clash and disparities between man in a conflicting natural and psychological environment. The artists will try to gauge reactions through perceptions of the temporal, spatial, surreal and the abstract— studying the relationships between void and material, silence and motion in diverse spaces.       A work by Francesco Arena’s "278 km (as a letter of Nietzsche)" - will be presented by Kadel Willborn. The work created in 2014 sees performers, one at a time, walking the perimeter and diagonal axes of a room until they have reached a total distance of 278 km - the distance that separates Basel from Turin, and the length of the journey that Nietzsche's friend Overbeck negotiated to bring him back to Basel in an attempt to help Nietzsche recover from mental illness. The performance will be staged for seven consecutive hours each day. 

Sadie Coles HQ will present a performance by Darren Bader "itled, ‘The Gardeners in Paradise’, the fifth and final iteration of the artist’s lawnmower-based works, and a sequel to "The Gardeners", first realized at the London gallery in 2012. The performance was a engagement between culture, technology and ecology featuring well-known cultural personalities, who operated blood-powered garden tools. The "Gardeners in Paradise" sees Bader set forth an absurd paradise, in which the gardening implements seen in his earlier project achieve their perfect afterlife, performing surreal actions indefinitely. Galerie Krinzinger will host "Panamera" (2007-2013), Gottfried Bechtold’s most recent Porsche project – a hybrid artifact that oscillates between a classical sculpture and a functional object. The work is the continuation of the artist’s interest in and exploration of the notion of sculpture. It will be shown in Basel’s Manor department store. Bugada & Cargnel will present a project by Pierre Bismuth, "Performances, Works In Situ", (2014), — a series of new performances staged in various public spaces, hardly distinguishable from the ordinary activities of passers-by. The series with humour and minimal aesthetic intervention will try to destabilize pre-established codes of perception and push the viewers to scrutinize the reality around them. 

Art :Concept will exhibit a new painting by Jean-Luc Blanc, ‘Un peu étroit’ (2014). The artist, in his work, redefines the idea of desire by operating a detachment between his subject and its context while at the same time introducing a notion of absurdity.

 Chris Burden’s "Holmby Hills Light Folly" (2012), presented by Gagosian Gallery will consist of four intricate cast iron benches and four rare cast iron lamps from the 1920’s. The four lamps are placed in each corner of a room with the benches placed between each lamp, creating a quiet space in which to sit and reflect. 

Lisson Gallery and GB agency will present "Make Everything like it’s your Last" (2013) by Ryan Gander, a playful advertising campaign of posters that reflect life within an imagined utopian society. Galleria Franco Noero will host Gavin Brown’s enterprise, "The Modern Institute" while Galerie Eva Presenhuber will jointly present "Tilted Shadow’ (2013) and "Magenta Torque Moment" (2014) by Mark Handforth, two monumental horseshoe sculptures that will be displayed in a public and open context, entering into a dialogue with one another and with the pre-existing urban space. Shaped like delicate paper cut-outs in a composition that appears as simple as a collage, the sculptures fight against the natural weight of the metal they are constructed from, conveying a sense of monumentality with the lightest touch. Rodeo will show "Proposal for a Crystal Building" (2003) by Iman Issa, an urban planner, architect and designer, Issa will present a proposal for a crystal structure, which would theoretically be placed in a central urban environment. Though architectural in appearance, the plans and models are offered without information on the scale or purpose of the structure, leaving the work somewhere between what is functional and logical, and what is bizarre, or even surreal. 

"Men Asleep" (2012) by João Penalva,  presented by Simon Lee Gallery, is a collection of photographs which began with the artist’s first purchase of a 1940s family snapshot of a man asleep in an armchair, and which has grown into a collection of over three hundred photographs of men who have fallen asleep – in public or private spaces – rather than in their beds.  Seth Price’s audio work "8-4 9-5 10-6 11-7" (2007) will be jointly presented by Petzel Gallery and Galerie Gisela Capitain. The artist edited together a single, eight-hour mp3 track of continuously mixed dance music from the last 30 years. The "song" will be played in its entirety at 11 locations throughout Kleinbasel over an eight hour period each day, the length of a typical working day. The title of the work refers to various working hours one might find in radically different contexts: union labour, office work, art world labour, or the department store.

 Galerie Eva Presenhuber and Stuart Shave/Modern Art will show Eva Rothschild’s sculpture, "This and This and This" (2013), a combination of three triangles intertwined to create an angular structure, seeming to be resting seamlessly upon each other. 

Gagosian Gallery will present a new sculpture by Zeng Fanzhi, "Untitled" (2014)- a plum tree branch covered in a thin layer of snow, the work heralds the advent of a broader aesthetic and thematic direction for the artist and reveals his ambition to incorporate refined elements of traditional Chinese art into contemporary practice. The opening Parcours Night will feature two special one-off performances in addition to late-night openings of all Parcours sights. Artist, composer, filmmaker and triathlete Guido van der Werve’s 45 minute requiem, ‘Home, a Requiem’ (2011-2012)", presented by Luhring Augustine and Marc Foxx Gallery. It will be performed by a 20 string orchestra and 28 strong choir at Clara Kirche at 10 pm. The performance is presented with the support of the Mondriaan Fund, Amsterdam, and performed by the Orchestra of Europe, Switzerland. The requiem was created to accompany the artist’s latest film work, ‘Nummer veertien, Home’ (2012), which will be shown at Art Basel. 

Jan Mot and Proyectos Monclova will jointly show ‘The Schlieren Plot’ by Mario García Torres. The work is a lyrical essay that re-imagines the works artist Robert Smithson planned, but left unfinished in Texas between 1967 and 1973. Through a montage of moving images, sound, music and a voice over, the film claims that the Texas’ climate, history and subjectivities actually realize the works and make them exist, possibly as testimonies to a deliberate forward thinking by Smithson. The work will be screened at Kino Cinema, with an introduction by Mario García Torres and Florence Derieux. 

-Staff Writer