Art Basel Unlimited: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

For 25 years, Art Basel Unlimited has sought to provide a platform for works of singular ambition, historical weight and exceptional scale – projects that exceed the spatial and commercial limits of the traditional fair booth. 

This year, Ruba Katrib, chief curator and director of curatorial affairs at MoMA PS1 in New York, makes her Unlimited debut, giving space to 59 individual projects proposed by 66 participating galleries. Works include performance, site-specific installation, video, photography, film and large-scale environments, bringing together emerging artists alongside established names such as Tracey Emin, Matthew Barney, Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha and Antony Gormley.

Like Velvet Buzzsaw made real, this year’s Unlimited section often seems to ask whether an artwork can survive on scale and provocation alone, with too many pieces dressing thin aesthetic execution in the language of sociopolitical or historical discourse while ultimately delivering spectacle over substance. Yet it also contains genuine gems, including major works that reach beyond art into the histories of war, politics and sociocultural conflict, confronting fairgoers with the resurgent narratives shaping the current disorder of the world. The result is a persistent friction between force, excess and tension; substance, spectacle and reckoning: the good, the bad and the ugly.

Installation view of Peter Hujar: The Gracie Mansion Show at Art Basel Unlimited. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery

The Good: Peter Hujar

Displayed at the centre of the fair, Ortuzar Projects and Fraenkel Gallery restage Peter Hujar’s 1986 exhibition, Recent Photographs, at Gracie Mansion Gallery in New York. The show at the East Village gallery was the photographer’s eighth and last, presenting 70 prints in the year before his death at the age of fifty-three, when Hujar was still unknown outside of a relatively small coterie in the city’s downtown scene.

The presentation brings together artists, friends, landscapes, animals, nudes and abandoned buildings which, when seen today, carries added historical charge, capturing an intimate portrait of queer life, artistic kinship and private vulnerability at the edge of profound cultural rupture. 

Seen through Hujar’s uncompromising lens, the constellation evokes his raw sensitivity, balancing the stark contrasts of black-and-white photography with the visceral, untamed and often vulnerable presence of his subjects. Against the fair’s louder gestures, Hujar’s work emerges as a force of raw intimacy: dark, unflinching and yet charged with hope, mirroring the fractured present.

Runners-up: Isa Genzken, Helen Marten, Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Installation view of Yayoi Kusama's Flowers That Bloom in the Cosmos. Courtesy Art Basel.

The Bad: Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama’s Flowers That Bloom in the Cosmos (2022), presented here by David Zwirner, stands nearly six metres high with multicoloured petals, polka-dotted surfaces and ‘almost dancing’ movement. It overwhelms the eye before it has time to resonate. Its stated ‘themes of love, beauty and hope’ feel less like transcendence than evasion, closer to a monumental ‘live, laugh, love’ affirmation staged against the far heavier backdrop of the present. The accompanying link between the flower, the ‘organic world’, the wider universe and Kusama’s childhood in her family’s plant nursery feels more imposed than revealed. At this scale, the work does not so much deepen those associations as flatten them into penetrating, coloured spectacle. Perhaps its public debut was delayed for a reason.

Runners-up: John Armleder, Yuichi Hirako, Zarah Alghamdi

Installation view of Alfredo Jaar's The Power of Words at Art Basel Unlimited. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Thomas Schulte.

The Ugly: Alfredo Jaar

Tucked away in a black box, Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar’s The Power of Words (1984/2021) shows how difficult material can become enlightening rather than merely distressing. Projected through the vacant frame of a typewriter, the work presents harrowing press images of global human crises, exposing the uneasy relationship between image, language and responsibility. The title itself feels bitterly ironic: words are invoked only to reveal their insufficiency in the face of suffering, leaving the image to carry its full ethical weight. 

Yet for all their vast political and social implications, the photographs feel piercingly intimate, collapsing the distance between spectator and subject and forcing viewers to confront not only what is represented, but their own position as witnesses. Set against a red neon glow that turns the black box into a space of warning, The Power of Words remains urgently relevant more than four decades after its conception, exposing the precarious ways images circulate, mutate and are manipulated, and asking who ultimately controls the narratives through which suffering is seen, framed and understood.
Runners-up: Chris Burden, Nikita Kadan, Ai Wei Wei