Can a garden ever really be empty? This question came to mind when I first encountered the work Empty Garden 3. It seems as if there is always something that wants to grow, to prevail, to run wild. According to the artist, the idea for this piece came to her in the garden at Giverny, where Monet created a vast landscape of parkland and ponds. This garden not only served as a source of inspiration for his paintings, but the motifs from his paintings were in turn incorporated into the design of the garden—an artistic cycle, it seems. But there is a crucially ambivalent nature to this, according to Ursula Palla. While the garden is a cornucopia of color and exuberant growth for Monet and also for us as visitors, it is an empty place for insects in their search for food. Only in the mild winter months between November and March do wild herbs, plants and weeds sometimes sprout that are not otherwise permitted by the strict garden concept—an off-season and also a kind of in-between, which the artist also experienced during her stay there. In Ursula Palla’s projection installation, the membrane—whether the wall or the floor—that was actually intended to function as a clear demarcation of the work seems to merge with the work itself. The bronze plant structures rising up from the floor, which sprawl throughout the room like a drawing in dark and subdued tones rather than lush colors, are illuminated and simultaneously enhanced by a projection. This is not something to glance at quickly or pass by rapidly, but to wander around, to stop and observe. Doesn’t a plant swaying back and forth start to emerge more clearly from the blurriness?

These subtle nuances are the foundation of Ursula Pallas’s decades of precise work, which is reflected in her two pieces in the exhibition—Empty Garden and Distelblatt (Thistle Leaf). Between sculpture, installation and video projection, between fast motion and fine movements, between dark spaces and brightly lit areas, between growth and a fixed state cast in bronze—the in-between is fundamental to her artistic practice, which never loses sight of beauty while simultaneously paying attention to things that are fleeting, endangered, perishable, and on the verge of disappearing forever. Empty Garden is therefore not a paradox, but a portrait in time of something that was, is and could be.

Mit Drucktechniken sei sie gross geworden, erwähnt Eva Nielsen im Gespräch, und so mag sich ihre Affinität und auch ihr fast natürlicher Umgang zu Siebdrucken und Überlagerungen generell begründen. Und doch ist da viel mehr in ihren Malereien, die sich auf vielen Ebenen in bestehende Räume einschreiben und zugleich selbst Räume ausbilden. Als Tapetendruck, nur wenige Millimeter von der Wand abstehend, als Leinwandgemälde in unterschiedlichen Grössen an der Wand installiert oder als skulpturale Struktur mitten im Raum platziert, öffnet sich die Malerei von Eva Nielsen als malerischer Raum im Raum.

Oftmals sind es architektonische oder skulpturale Fragmente, die in ihren Werken ablesbar sind. Die inneren Bilder, die hier wachgerufen werden, mögen so vielschichtig sein wie die Betrachtenden selbst: kunsthistorische Zitate von Land-Art-Künstlern und -Künstlerinnen der 1960er- und 1970er-Jahre, ruinös gewordene oder noch nicht vollendete Bauen, Kriegshinterlassenschaften an Küstenstreifen, skulpturale Setzungen, Öffnungen und Übergänge sind ebenso präsent wie Landschaften, in denen schemenhaft Menschen erscheinen, träumerisch im Gras liegend, in die Weite blickend. Doch eine genaue Deutung bleibt offen. Gerade in der Überlagerung mit der Malerei, die landschaftsähnliche Perspektiven ermöglicht, Verortungen der architektonischen Fragmente setzt und sie dennoch frei im Raum schwebend zeigt, schafft Eva Nielsen vor allem Denk- und Sehräume. Sie bietet die Möglichkeit zu erfahren und einer nicht linear zu verstehenden Narration zu folgen. Denn trotz der Erinnerungen an Bekanntes erzählt das Gesehene von einem noch nicht Erlebten.

Als würde die französische Künstlerin uns selbst an die Grenzen von Bezüglichkeiten führen, so wird auch das Material durch unterschiedliche Druck- und Maltechniken bisweilen an seine eigenen Grenzen geführt. Nicht zuletzt, um offen zu sein für das, was nicht nur das Material, sondern auch uns antreibt und am besten vorantreibt: die Zufälle im Leben, das Noch-nicht-aber-vielleicht-schon-Bald. Vielleicht hat Eva Nielsen auch deshalb der Blick aus dem Fenster des Kunsthauses so begeistert – weil dort bereits vieles möglich war und noch vieles möglich sein wird. Das Eintreffen von etwas, das weder planbar noch vorhersehbar ist und dessen Verlauf – ob gut oder schlecht – nicht immer klar zu fassen ist.

For over forty years, Christian Marclay has been consistently working on combining different disciplines and genres such as video, collage, sound, sculpture, installation, performance and photography. His work Telephones, shown here, is now considered a milestone in the history of video art. This was the first time that the artist used an edited sequence of both black-and-white and color film clips from throughout cinematic history, which all revolve around the telephone: waiting for a call, picking up the receiver, speaking into it, waiting and hanging up again. The act of using the various telephones becomes charged with significance, as the different protagonists and characters within the short scenes and their new arrangement give these brief moments of talking to each other, waiting for each other, or even threatening and frightening each other a whole new meaning.

Marclay himself has stated that he has always felt the impulse to create collages, whether with found or printed objects or with sound. His explanation: “Why not react to what already exists around you, rather than reinventing the wheel? Records allowed me to mix pre-existing sounds, but the idea of mixing sounds linked to actions projected onto a screen—diegetic sounds—came to me in the 1980s with the advent of videodiscs such as the LaserDisc. However, that was still too technically complicated, and I’ve always preferred low-tech.” The sequences of film clips used by the artist for Telephonescan be understood as a clever, sometimes very amusing rearrangement that creates a new temporal logic and order. Although the many short clips have nothing to do with each other in reality, the montage transforms them into a new narrative. Similar to a musical composition, Marclay combines cinematic visuals and audio to create a new “sound image.”

Of the 18,000 worlds that make up the universe, we only experience one. This sentence, which reflects the mythical beliefs of Saodat Ismailova’s homeland, is the starting point of the artist’s large-scale video work, which is now being shown in Switzerland for the first time. Ismailova, who comes from Uzbekistan and has been living in Paris for several years, offers us a deeper understanding of this country in the heart of Central Asia, where people live between enlightenment and a technologically unrestrained present, immersed in centuries-old rituals, mysticism, legends and tales.

In a collage-like video format that combines both found historical material and recent footage taken by the artist herself, Ismailova draws references to the evolution of film, from early silent movies in Uzbekistan through to the films of the Soviet Union, which have influenced cinematic history throughout the whole of Central Asia.

Landscapes play a central role here, as they have a crucial influence on people’s lives. “Everything,” says the artist in an interview, “comes from the water”: from the river, from the animals, their sounds, language, movement and the memories, rituals and stories that evolve from them. However, it is not only the ecosystem that is in danger here, but also the political system, especially regarding the status of women. Women often play the leading roles in Ismailova’s videos. According to the artist, they are the guardians of the country’s cultural and spiritual heritage, which is passed down from mothers to daughters for generations in the form of stories and customs. In a radically changing country, it is precisely these stories, rituals and the belief in their continued existence that are particularly at risk. The modern era seems to be robbing cultures of their essence. The younger generation is leaving the country, and the previously hard-earned freedom of women now seems vulnerable—a brief glance at the neighboring countries of Russia or Afghanistan is enough to understand just how quickly advances in freedom and equality can be eroded.

Saodat Ismailova preserves these delicate bonds of continuity, portrays breathtakingly beautiful landscapes and demonstrates her belief in the endurance of memories and stories. Her art should be understood as an invitation to engage with these stunning visual narratives.

The multifaceted oeuvre of French-Moroccan artist Bouchra Khalili—which includes film, video, installation, photography, printmaking, publishing and textiles—explores migration flows in the Mediterranean region and their impact on migrants in different countries. During the Arab Spring of 2010 to 2012, the artist also began to develop a series of projects examining the history of emancipation and liberation in North Africa and the Middle East.

The video trilogy on display at the Kunsthaus, The Speeches Series, takes up these themes and divides them into language (Chapter 1), citizenship (Chapter 2) and work (Chapter 3). For the first chapter, Mother Tongue, the artist worked with five exiles living in Paris and the surrounding suburbs. Khalili invited them to translate important excerpts of a sociopolitical or cultural nature by Aimé Césaire, Mahmoud Darwish, Édouard Glissant, Malcolm X and Abdelkrim El Khattabi into their own languages then memorize and recite them. For the second chapter, Words on Streets, she collaborated with five immigrants in Genoa to develop manifestos on topics such as nationality, citizenship and belonging. In the third chapter, Living Labour, five New Yorkers describe their daily working conditions as so-called “sans papiers”. They reflect the structures of oppression they experience and demonstrate the profound extent of social and political exclusion. The Speeches Series is a forceful examination of the current situation for migrants, in which empowerment through language plays a central role. In Khalili’s work, language becomes the medium that communicates the reality as well as the ongoing struggle of migrants—both today and throughout history.

Since the beginning of her career, the New York-based artist and poet Ibtisam Tasnim Zaman has intensively engaged with questions relating to violence toward and oppression of the LGBTQIA community in the Middle East—and the rest of the world—as well as the consequences of neo-colonialism. Her impressive paintings, which resemble Eastern tapestries in their presentation and storytelling format, create a powerful visual narrative for attentive viewers that mediates between collective memory and private recollection.

In the work Al Awra—The Intimate Parts, for which the artist received an award, Ibtisam Tasnim Zaman depicts four different types of women. These women are subject to different laws within patriarchal societies from Yemen to Turkey, as the map in the background suggests. According to the artist, this piece is partly autobiographical: it reflects the experiences of her mothers, who met as lesbians in an underground gay club in Dubai and had to deal with the harsh consequences. It is also Ibtisam Tasnim Zaman’s own story as a Black lesbian American who grew up in a strict Muslim household—and therefore a highly patriarchal society—but was able to emancipate herself despite facing hurdles and violent confrontations.

Her latest work also depicts her personal experiences in Basel. In 2024, she spent six months at Atelier Mondial at Dreispitz as part of a studio scholarship. The artist describes the creative process as resembling a fever dream, into which a wide variety of experiences, both positive and negative, flowed. It is also an attempt to deepen her understanding of the similarities and differences between the places she has already visited in the course of her life.

In her artistic practice, Ibtisam Tasnim Zaman not only examines her personal history, but also hidden aspects of structures of oppression in Europe and Switzerland. Her work Ein Land Weiss Waschen, produced in Basel, deals with postcolonial issues relating to the production of chocolate in Switzerland since the nineteenth century. It also highlights the long-lasting impact of the industry on countries such as Ghana, Congo and the Côte d’Ivoire. According to the artist, this multibillion-dollar industry relies on imports of the main ingredients, cocoa beans and sugar. This demand is linked to high rates of poverty, deforestation and a monopoly on food crops, as well as the violent oppression of people, including many children. For the artist, this devastating structure of wealth, exploitation, oppression and lived neutrality manifests itself in one of Switzerland’s best-known yet ambivalent children’s book characters: Globi. This figure has also found its way into her paintings.

The work of Palestinian artist Aysha E Arar reflects what she describes as freedom, love and unconventional lightness. Her “in-between” is an ability—the ability to live and act metaphorically in water and on land, like amphibians, and to build a bridge between fantasy and reality through her art. It seems as if anything could serve as a pictorial background for the artist, a carrier of stories, references, dreams and hopes. Aysha E Arar develops her wildly pulsating, overlapping, sprawling and yet finely nuanced drawings and paintings on cloths or clothing that rise up on the walls like birds. In large gestures and bright colors, her paintings unfold on her canvases and are then cut out by the artist along their outlines. Similar to a wall or ceiling painting, Arar applies her works to the exhibition space—everything flows together, embedded in quotations from her own texts and poems. It is easy to understand why the artist not only needs a paintbrush, pencil or even words for her visually powerful narratives, but also song, a sound that transcends spaces, borders and planes. A grand narrative seems to have captured the space, one that encompasses yesterday, today and tomorrow, that does not lose sight of the present while boldly venturing into the future.

The titles that Arar chooses sometimes lead the viewer directly into the events of the image, turning hands into embraces or into a struggle for freedom and protection. They are reminiscent of stories such as Alice in Wonderland, in which the world seems to be upside down; the artist is always tracing our present relationship with the world, with all its fractures, beauty, brutality, fear and sadness, but also all the loving and hopeful gestures that exist as well as our constant quest for freedom and identity. Arar describes herself as so many things—an artist, a wife, a mother, a witness to the devastating geopolitical events currently taking place and a symbol of feminist awakening as well as the uprising of Muslim women. Above all, however, she is someone who is moving forwards: her images penetrate walls and cracks, occupy ceilings and continue to flow. Her artistic work almost resembles a large garden that grows, transforms and spreads throughout the rooms like a song.

Since the 1990s, the Amsterdam-based artist Marijke van Warmerdam has been developing an extensive filmic oeuvre that includes 16 mm and 35 mm films, videos, photography, sculptures, installations and paintings. She has been a professor at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe since 2004; as a mentor for young artists, she encourages them to forge their own dynamic artistic path between sculpture, film and photography.

Marijke van Warmerdam’s distinctive, engaging works are mostly short yet highly poetic moments in time that she depicts in films, such as the three pieces shown in the current exhibition: Dream machine, It’s time and Le retour du chapeau. These works have no sound and last only a few minutes; they resemble everyday sketches that seem familiar—and yet there is always something fantastic and mysterious about them. They are excerpts, or rather glimpses, that seem to temporarily change our sense of time and space by stretching or shortening it. In any case, they are able to pull us out of the monotony of daily life. For it is not narratives that the artist presents, but rather visually powerful, sculpturally staged film sketches that, especially due to their brevity and screening in a loop, are able to anchor themselves in our memory as a new image. For example, doesn’t experiencing these works make us take a closer look at the way the colors in a glass of water change, like in Dream machine? Or perhaps we will soon be longing for the famous Creux du Van in the Swiss Jura mountains, where legend says that unpredictable whirlwinds can cause many a hat we thought we was lost to land on our heads again of its own accord? And isn’t there a clock constantly ticking in our hand—whether wrapped around our wrists or on the cell phones we are holding—to remind us of our constant reachability and the relentless passage of time?

Marijke van Warmerdam’s films are like little wish machines that reveal fantastic possibilities despite many uncertainties. They encourage us to dream of worlds that often don’t seem so far removed from reality.

Brigham Baker’s artistic approach can be defined by his conceptual and playful engagement with natural processes and everyday materials. His works, which include both painterly and sculptural forms, offer new perspectives on cultural objects and phenomena by placing them in self-referential frames that emphasize their interdependencies with time, nature and the elements.

The photographs of flames in handmade frames exhibited here are part of a new series that Baker created earlier this year during a residency in Paris. The project began when Baker came across a photograph of architect and designer Eileen Gray. In one of the last known images of Gray, she sits next to a fireplace filled with broken furniture, cardboard boxes and other items waiting to be burned. This image deeply moved Baker, as the imminent fire symbolizes Gray’s impending death and the passing of her life and work into historical memory.

Inspired by this, Baker began collecting objects from the streets of Paris—furniture, renovation detritus and other materials similar to those in the photograph. He brought these objects to his studio and reworked them into a serial frame format. The artist used the waste from these materials as kindling, which he photographed as it burned unpredictably. These photographs, which show the fire destroying the same material used for the frames, create a paradoxical situation in which various entropic processes are depicted at the same time. The rectangular, spiraling and multilayered frames made of different materials almost resemble a view of the fireplace through the chimney. Here, the material is no longer the cause of the fire, but a representation of it.

The Apples works, on the other hand, are an eleven-part photo series that Baker created for the Manor Art Prize in 2019. He took close-up photographs of an apple tree in front of his studio window in Zurich over a long period of time. The apples grow and ripen, decompose, rot and virtually disappear, all while remaining connected to the tree on which they hang. Each stage seems to preserve its own unique character and therefore its poetry.

Subtle observations and a willingness to dive in and get closer are the hallmarks of Brigham Baker’s work, which always contains moments of anticipation.

The Swedish artist Klara Lidén, who lives in New York and Berlin, has spent many years dedicating herself to a multifaceted oeuvre that includes performances in both urban and private spaces as well as large-scale installations, films and videos. Her works are mostly her own spatial activations, which she captures on film. As well as the term “activation,” “social activism” would be another apt description of her work. Before turning to art, Klara Lidén studied architecture, which explains her deep interest in and fascination with urban planning strategies and designing interior and exterior spaces. She uses her own body to explore physical and mental boundaries in both public and private spaces.

In her two works on display at the Kunsthaus, Lidén uses objects that only reveal their former use and context on closer inspection. These are the familiar and now seemingly useless advertising lightboxes in public spaces. By scraping off the paint and logos, Lidén has stripped these lightboxes of their function. What was once used to advertise pharmacies, the Berliner Zeitung or banks is now presented as a glowing white surface—a promise of something that once was and is no more, but perhaps will be again in the future. However, the works also reflect the ongoing global urban developments that seem to pass us by almost imperceptibly—places that open, close, are important for a while before suddenly losing relevance, and the role that we as city dwellers play in them.

The video artist Judith Albert has spent almost thirty years working on a striking oeuvre of moving images that inscribe themselves in the viewer’s memory in a truly unique way: in these slow sequences, it always takes a moment for the observer to find their bearings. These fantastic scenes, which resemble something from a dream or a fairy tale and are often enriched with quotes from art history, are superimposed with the delicate movements of people seen from a distance or close up. Sometimes there are only allusions to these movements, which is why Albert’s video works have been aptly described as tableaux vivants.

The play of shadows and twilight both lend Judith Albert’s works—such as Côte de Granit Rose—a poetic depth and tension through their faded layers. Are these pink rocks morphing into bodies? Does dusk harbor a danger, and is the person walking in a wide circle engulfed by it? In the midst of the increasingly dark forest scenery, do their bare legs become a fragile and vulnerable element? In works like mare mosso, the artist also opts for multiple projections and filmed duplications: while the first shot is projected onto a piece of paper, then manipulated and filmed again, the second shot with the superimposed layers forms the actual work.

The “in-between,” which is the title of the exhibition at the Kunsthaus, serves as a driving artistic force for Judith Albert’s film and video works. It seems logical that the Zurich-based artist not only uses a video camera and an editing suite in her artistic practice, but also a pencil and digital drawings, in which she always captures subtle details with precise strokes. As she explains in an interview, she is less interested in an either/or, but rather in a both/and, which can be both poetic and political, loud and quiet, gentle and forceful—something that seems perfectly consistent with regard to her work.