Art Basel & Liste 2025

Erin Jane Nelson’s works at Chapter NY featured photographs of natural landscapes embedded in ceramic frames, alongside organic-shaped ceramic sculptures. On closer inspection, it is revealed that the sculptures contain pinhole cameras, which Nelson used to create the photographs on display. The use of craft materials and ecological subject matter results in grounded, spiritual works which embrace slow, traditional practices as a salve to the anxieties of the present.

Herald St’s booth featured works by British-Korean artist Sang Woo Kim, whose dye transfer works, paired with oil paintings, interrogate the complex politics of looking. His Ways of Seeing series features images of eyes, pulled from medical textbooks, art historical sources, and social media, reproduced in saturated pinks and washes of blue. Through his previous work as a fashion model, where he often found himself exoticised under the Western gaze, and his current work as an artist, Kim has become deeply interested in the subversion of subject and object and the power dynamics these roles convey.

Joyce Jouma won the Baloise prize this year for her booth at Eli Kerr gallery, featuring dozens of fuse boxes which contain back-lit photographs. While living in Lebanon, where electricity is only available at certain times of day, the artist became increasingly interested in how politics affect space and lived experience. Each photograph is of a specific space and was programmed to light up only when the place depicted would receive electricity in Lebanon. The work is subtle, poignant, and quietly political.

Cristina Guerra Gallery presented a mixed booth with many conceptual photographic works, including John Baldessari’s collage Raised Eyebrows/Furrowed Foreheads (Part One): Airplane Falling, featuring cropped images of brows above a falling fighter jet. Hanging on the opposite wall was Jonathan Monk’s composite photograph, which features an early exhibition of his, layered with a postcard signed by John Baldessari, three real oranges, and a Smiths record. Both Monk and Baldessari use collaging to disrupt existing narratives and associations, building their own conceptual structures, equally influenced by the personal and the popular.

Over at Liste, which celebrated its thirtieth anniversary, photography took centre stage, with artists notably embracing the uncanniness of images in the digital realm. Matt Keegan’s works at Magenta Plains integrated photography and painting within the same canvas. Inspired by flashcards that his mother used to teach English as a foreign language, the paintings feature domestic objects, with images drawn from advertising. Photographs are layered over oil paintings, resulting in variations in perspective, sharpness, and style, which evoke the dreamlike quality of childhood memories. A screen integrated into a large cabinet creates a trompe l'oeil effect and features a video of his mother explaining the treasured objects in her china cabinet. Overall, the works explore the fallacy of language as a tool of representation and the importance of material culture for evoking and preserving memory.

Ana Viktoria Dzinc, showing with Nicoletti, also blends photography, painting, and video. Her canvas works begin with a photographic pigment transfer, onto which she paints with acrylic before drawing with charcoal. These portraits of figures prominent in internet discourse (think J.K. Rowling and Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen from Twilight), and this layered process create a material quality which feels acutely digital. 

Accompanying the works was a floral display and a video work in which flowers in a local supermarket gain consciousness and discover a plot against them. Part soap opera, part philosophical rumination on the complexities of consciousness, the work is sharp, witty and pertinent.

Marietta Mavrokordatou used a kaleidoscope and a macro lens to emulate her own perception for her series of digital photographs at Brunette Coleman’s booth. Mavrokordatou is short-sighted, and in her practice uses spotlights, macro lenses and kaleidoscopes to manually recreate the way she sees the world. Kaleidoscopes were originally invented in the 19th century as a way for scientists to study how light was refracted and polarised, and thus were useful in learning more about both vision and photography. These conceptual and autobiographical works explore the nuances of perception through beautifully composed, abstracted forms.