JULY 21, 2019 • THE WEEK 71EVERYONE IS A CAMERA
BOSE KRISHNAMACHARI[email protected]EVERYONE IS A CAMERA
BOSE KRISHNAMACHARIPHOTO THE SUN BY UGO RONDINONE AT UNLIMITED 2019/COURTESY: ART BASEL
I
n 2012, I was fortunate enough to spend time
with Alfons Hug at documenta 13. I was there
as part of a BRICS curatorial travel programme.
Later, we presented a video art project that he had
curated at the first Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Hug is
an important curator who has done many signif-
icant projects in the last 20 years. He curated the
São Paulo Biennial 2002, the 2002 and 2005 Brazil
Pavilion and the 2011 Latin American Pavilion at
the Venice Biennale. He was also chief curator of
the 2nd Montevideo Biennial. Earlier he was a cu-
rator at the House of World Cultures in Berlin. He
has also been the director of the Goethe-Institut in
many countries.
I think of Hug as an energetic vagabond. I want
to mention him because of his enthusiasm for art
and his selflessness. When I was rushing to catch
my flight from Zurich to Mumbai after the Basel
Art Fair, he stopped me at
the gates and, without any
introductions or formalities,
started talking! “Unlimited
at the Basel Art Fair is like a
biennale,” he said. The mind
of a critic-curator, I thought.
He had said the same thing I
had felt.
Unlimited reinvention is
difficult in the habitual and ostentatious heavy-art
market. But, eight years ago, Art Basel introduced
this incredible parallel project called Unlimited.
The man behind it, the young Swiss curator Gianni
Jetzer—now in his final year of curating Unlimit-
ed—is also curator-at-large at Hirshhorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC. Every
time I get the opportunity to go to Art Basel, I look
forward to Unlimited. Of course, at the adjacent
Messe building you have galleries from around the
world and exhibitor Indian galleries like Chemould
Prescott Road, Gallery SKE, Vadehra and Exper-
imenter. The six-day fair is attended by around
80,000 people. Next door, you see the Miami
Design Basel with all kinds of products, furniture,
jewellery, vintage cars and many more designs.The Kunstmuseum exhibitions of William
Kentridge with the largest installations and
eight-channel projection was remarkable. The
same project was exhibited at the recent edition of
the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. The effects of char-
coal, animated skilled drawings and the narra-
tions through the performances; its layers and
dark surfaces and the shadows, the drama... pure
Kentridge! Fondation Beyeler put up two great
shows. The first titled The Young Picasso-Blue and
Rose Period, and the second an immensely skilled
presence of images, mediums and materiality pre-
sented by artist Rudolf Stingel. I was seeing it all for
the first time. I cannot forget Picasso’s mastery and
Stingel’s mesmerising material aesthetics.
Another good exhibition was Body Fantasies by
Rebecca Horn at Museum Tinguely in Basel. Her
works combine early performative works and later
kinetic sculptures to highlight
lines of development within
her oeuvre, the transforma-
tion processes of the body
and very sensitive and calcu-
lated sciences and mathe-
matics in human structure.
Another great experience
was a piece of home at the
border of Germany. Vitra
Design Museum presented on the Indian architect,
Pritzker Prize-winner B.V. Doshi. I think this was
the master’s first international retrospective. I took
a 30-minute ride from Basel to Vitra to see it.
I was also fortunate to meet the legendary
Argentinian artist Rirkrit Tiravanija. We were
introduced by the curator and writer Hans Ulrich
Obrist. Tiravanija resides between New York,
Berlin, Chiang Mai and Hong Kong—another
vagabond! His installations often take the form of
stages or rooms for sharing meals, cooking, read-
ing or playing music. The architecture or structures
for living and socialising is the core element in
his works. His work, I think, is important because
this creation of spaces for coexistence is one of the
essential elements of art itself.Art, unlimited