Messe Basel – Hall II, Messeplatz 10, Basel (Switzerland)
The scale tells you immediately. The first thing you see on entering is twelve oversized LAPD uniforms hanging in a row — Chris Burden’s L.A.P.D. Uniforms (1993), made in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots. Complete with badges, batons, handcuffs, and deactivated guns, each uniform built for an officer standing over two metres tall. The size hits first, then the subject. Something about them felt familiar — not from an exhibition, but from the news cycle, from the recurring image of institutional power that keeps returning. More than three decades on, the work has not become history.
This is Unlimited — Art Basel’s platform for works that cannot fit a booth, cannot be contained by a fair’s usual logic. In 2026, curated for the first time by Ruba Katrib of MoMA PS1, the sector occupies a vast hangar-like hall at Messe Basel: 59 projects, no partitions. I visited during Unlimited Night — the fair after hours, the hall quieter than the daytime crowd allows, the large-scale works given more room to breathe. People were strolling, wandering, occasionally stopping cold in front of something. The atmosphere was calm. The works were not.
Just past the entrance, Benoît Piéron’s Cairns (2026) — fifteen mounds of pastel recycled hospital bedsheets arranged across the floor, each with ceramic eyes peering out from the folds. In mountain tradition, cairns mark the way for travellers. Piéron came to hospitals as a child: diagnosed with leukemia at three after contracting meningitis, the ward became a second landscape, the sheets its terrain. The ceramic eyes give each mound a personality, something between creature and monument. They are, despite everything, oddly cheerful.
Eva Jospin’s Panorama (2016) is an enclosed circular space built entirely from cardboard strips — intricately woven, floor to ceiling, into the texture of roots and undergrowth. You walk in. Inside, it is dim and dense and close. The sensation is of entering a forest made by hand. Relaxing and slightly unsettling in equal measure.
Herbert Brandl’s large untitled canvas (2019) announces itself with colour — bold, unambiguous, the kind of painting that holds its ground across a room. Marius Steiger’s Five Cars (Terror Management) (2026) presents five life-sized shaped canvases of automobiles locked into a cantilevered formation, immobilised and suspended. They read as joyful from a distance, then stranger the longer you look: machines of movement, frozen.
Yayoi Kusama’s Flowers That Bloom in the Cosmos (2022) produces an immediate, involuntary return to something earlier in life — a joy that feels almost physical. Some works do one thing and do it completely. This is one of them.
Yuichi Hirako’s Tree, Forest, Mountain (2025) assembles more than 7,500 hybrid figures on a table — human bodies with tree forms in place of heads, densely packed together. Playful up close, stranger at scale. The effect is somewhere between a landscape and a crowd.
Maria Loizidou’s Where Am I Now? (2025) is suspended overhead and in front of you — hand-woven stainless-steel mesh and aluminium forms hanging at a scale that makes the ceiling feel closer. The material is translucent, shifting faintly with the movement of visitors below. Standing in front of it, the work holds its position above you, and you adjust to it.
Edith Dekyndt’s Le cru et le cuit (2024) is the installation that stays with you. Its origin is a performance in which the artist chewed raw beetroot and spat the pulp onto glass surfaces. What remains at Unlimited is the trace: the stained glass panels, and a video document of the act itself. Somewhere between ritual, anthropology, and something the body does that the mind would rather not acknowledge.
Then, in the middle of the hall: Goshka Macuga’s Exhibition M: A Re-enactment (2023–2026). I stumbled into it without knowing what it was — a black floor, archival photographs arranged in a grid, soft sculptural forms, and two figures in dark suits whose faces were covered by black-and-white portraits of other people. One stood with arms raised, holding photographs. One sat on a small couch nearby, face equally obscured. Curiosity, before understanding. The work is inspired by André Malraux’s Le Musée Imaginaire — the performers embody Malraux, MoMA’s first director Alfred Barr, and Macuga herself, collapsing museum history into live action. What I encountered before knowing any of that was simply two figures who had replaced their own faces with someone else’s.
Unlimited runs for four days. You leave the hangar and step out into a quiet Messe Basel.. The scale of what you just saw stays with you on the walk out.
Artène covered Art Basel Unlimited 2026, 18 June 2026. All photography by Elasse.
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