Exhibition Guide
Résister, encore

Withdrawal, silence, resilience, outcry, indignation, protestation, action, reflection, satire… This group show illustrates the forms of resistance artists have developed when faced with the great challenges of our age. Those forms amount to survival strategies.

An increasingly overt distrust of neoliberal capitalism, the political class, or the systemic privileges of certain members of society is pushing a growing number of people to protest police violence, homophobia, corruption, sexual harassment, massive deforestation, White supremacy, restrictions stemming from the pandemic, wind turbines, the Islamic headscarf, immigration, globalization, etc.

Resistance is a fundamental component of art. Résister, encore (Resist Anew) explores exemplary strategies of resistance, both individual and collective, that are being devised in response to the great challenges of our age. By operating in the realm of the “useless,” and not having to conform to the “natural order of things,” the artist is free to raise all the fundamental questions without submitting to a given political, religious, economic, moral, or even esthetic context. The works featured in Résister, encore are not political manifestos of this or that allegiance, but rather independent creations and models of alternative worlds.

Bernard Fibicher, director Exhibition curator

Miriam Cahn

Banu Cennetoğlu

Michel François

Philip Guston

Thomas Hirschhorn

Amar Kanwar

William Kentridge

Kimsooja

Sigalit Landau

Nalini Malani

Teresa Margolles

Zanele Muholi

Félix Vallotton

Miriam Cahn’s paintings and drawings are arenas of combat, fields of battle. Rapes, atrocities, debasement, physical
violence, torture – viewers are spared nothing if they dare to come to grips with her work. This spontaneous, enraged painting, seemingly clumsy and often cynical (for example, the title “schönes bild” means “pretty picture”!) is the result of daily effort, a direct expression of the artist’s convictions and her view of a dramatic and inhuman world that leaves but little room for beauty, peace, and harmony. While asserting the sexual attributes of her figures, Cahn creates a type of human being who denies assignment to one gender and gendered roles. This human being wanders in an empty world; the only thing that keeps them in this nothingness is color. Existential creation, feminist manifesto, condemnation of all forms of destructive violence – resist again and always through painting, this is the Basel artist’s creed.

This piece pays homage to the journalist Gurbetelli Ersöz, the only woman to have served as the editor-in-chief of the pro-Kurd newspaper Özgür Gündem. After being arrested, imprisoned, and tortured, Ersöz decided to take up arms and join the guerilla group allied with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Between 1995 and 1997, the date when she died in combat, she kept a diary. Published initially in Germany in 1998, the diary was brought out in its original language, Turkish, in 2014 but was banned from distribution in Turkey. The lithographic stones presented on the steel shelving of Gurbet’s Diary (2016-2017) by Banu Cennetoğlu contain all of the diary passages in the Greek translation that was done for the Athens venue of documenta 14 (2017) and the display of the piece in the park of the Gennadius Library. The diary’s text waits to be printed while simultaneously forming an imposing piece of sculpture, a wall, and an act of commemoration.

Michel François has often worked on conceits and objects that seemingly offer a passage from a limiting here to a freer beyond. He drew up, for example, the plan for a temporary cell, elaborated escape plans, built a broken house, made holes in a wall, etc. This gilded cage (Golden Cage II, 2009) is an unstable, fragile construction that is both barrier and opening, paradoxical symbol of confinement and passage to somewhere else. The golden sparkle of the cage echoes the stack of posters with holes figuring a treasure, i.e., coins from around the world among which can be seen bullet casings. These works raise the (social? political?) question inherent in the following dichotomies: inclusion vs. exclusion and freedom vs. power. By way of an answer, the Belgian artist offers freedom spaces, where everything is both movement (the wall drawing Instant Drawing (2022) with “mobile” blocks of oak) and process, this and that at one and the same time.

Coming back to figuration in 1968 after a period of lyrical abstraction, the Jewish American artist Philip Guston caused quite a scandal at the time – even greater today – by depicting members of the Ku Klux Klan in their pointy hats doing everyday things like smoking a cigar, chatting, sleeping, driving a car, or… painting. By identifying with evil and exploring the psychological and moral complexity of vice, Guston points us to the existential dilemmas generated by White Supremacy. The painter’s white canvas is the same as the Klan members’ pointed headgear. Worse, Guston’s figures seem to be borrowed from a comic book. White Supremacy has comfortably settled into popular culture then – another form of the banalization of violence, which cannot help but appear scandalous.

For an artist who asserts that his “problem as an artist – and the problem for art – is to lend [things] form,” ruins offer a perfect training ground since “a ruin is a form, an eternal form, universal and timeless.” It is a form that is the result of the destruction of a form. Therefore, something to be considered for itself. Moreover, the title of this collage, A Ruin is a Ruin (2016), echoes the famous tautology given voice by the American author and art collector Gertrude Stein, “A rose is a rose is a rose,” which figures in her 1913 poem Sacred Emily. “A ruin,” Hirschhorn goes on to say, “is a timeless abstract place, free of all value.” The collage allows the artist to assemble on the same pictorial plane ruins from different ages and therefore makes a comparative analysis of its different forms possible as well. This formalist reading, however, reveals a state of the world that is eternally tragic, made up of “archeological ruins, corruption, natural disasters, fire, water, building flaws, cultural, political, esthetic, or economic collapse, weaknesses in materials, negligence, accident, bombing.”

This visual poem by the Indian filmmaker Amar Kanwar, titled Such a Morning (2017), is subversive in that it deals with perceiving nuances in a world that increasingly works with slogans, abridged messages, and binary systems. It offers us two people, a man and a woman, in their deliberately solitary project. A mathematician who abruptly left the university where he worked withdraws deep into the forest to an abandoned rail car, to study darkness in all its shades. His conscience and awareness gain in clarity as the world grows dark. His living space is the pessimistic symbol of both an impossible journey and impossible progress. Only a contemplative search outside of the world is possible still. The other character is a woman peacefully seated in an armchair reading as her house is torn down all around her. Here we watch the gradual entrance of light breaking through from the outside. These are two forms of individual resistance that are nonpassive, though symbolic, becoming exemplary because they are made public through the medium of film.

The video installation Notes Towards a Model Opera (2014-2015) by the South African artist is the outcome of long research into the phenomenon of the “model opera” genre invented during China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The aim of these operas was to celebrate class struggle and its proletarian heroes (workers and peasants), construct a new social memory in opposition to the “feudal” ideology of ancient China, and glorify revolutionary China thanks to its victories over its enemies like Japan. Kentridge tries to draw a parallel between this esthetic and ideological transformation of revolutionary Chinese opera and the context of South Africa, the history of its socialist leaders, and its musical tradition of “colonial” dance groups in the 1950s. He has worked closely with the famous choreographer and dancer Dada Masilo (Soweto, 1985) to develop an expressively ironic idiom. Numerous quotations and orders on posters (like “Seize the ego,” “Be not so refined,” and “Crush the 4 olds”) deconstruct art as a vehicle of propaganda and make Notes Towards a Model Opera an autonomous artwork of universal scope.

Since the early 1990s, the South Korean artist Kimsooja has been using bottari in her art, bundles made from colored bedspreads that are traditionally used in Korea for transporting clothing and everyday objects. She scatters them directly on the floor, either alone or in groups, or makes them a part of her videos and performances, tied up with string on the bed of a pickup truck that is seen driving through towns and the countryside, or figuring in object-sculptures like this Bottari Tricycle (2008). The piece can be mounted two ways, either in a “classic” version with the tricycle resting on all three wheels and bottari solidly stacked to the rear, or in a “baroque” one with the tricycle rearing up and the bundles scattered around on the floor. The piece is displayed here in its second, more dramatic version, which alludes to the dangers of migration and the tragedies caused by the forced displacement of peoples. Conference table? Cosmic landscape? Gardening following the Fukuoka farming method? There are no game rules in Archive of Mind (2017). We understand instinctively though that we have been invited to take part in a collective experience; we grab up a handful of clay, fashion it into a ball and place it on the vast tabletop. The piece is a literal composition, from the Latin com- (with, together) and ponere (to put). This collective piece of art draws on the energy and patience of each individual. Each ball is different and bears the singular prints of its maker’s hands. This archive of our bodies, the outcome of manual activity, rises above itself into a collective act of meditaion, an archive of the spirit. The constellation of clay balls, which is constantly changing and transforming throughout the show, teaches us through experience that we are simultaneously individuals and social beings, isolated and connected, bodies and a higher consciousness.

Sigalit Landau did the performance Barbed Hula (2001) without an audience present, in front of the camera lens alone, at daybreak on a beach south of Tel Aviv (that shore being the only natural and peaceful border of Israel). She filmed herself naked without showing her face, dancing with a hulahoop around her waist, but it is a hoop of barbed wire going round and round, symbolizing borders and imprisonment. The use of slow-motion and a long shot that gradually zooms in heighten the degree of pain felt by viewers, even though most of the metal barbs are turned outward. The artist initially studied dance before she entered the Israeli army to do her compulsory military service. Her artwork is intimately linked with the body and the concepts of resistance and exhaustion. Speaking about her piece Salted Lake (Salt Crystal Shoes on a Frozen Lake) (2011), Landau explain: “I made shoes coveredin heavy salt crystals by suspending them in the saline waters of the Dead Sea. After this, I took them to a frozen lake in the middle of Europe and placed them on the ice. Each shoe melted a big hole in the ice. At night, they finally fell and drowned in the freshwater lake. From the heights of the third strata of the pavilion, they fall and dive downwards burdened with history and gravity. I shot the video in Poland, in the revolutionary city of Gdansk, to create a work that touches upon collective memory and pain.” The title of the video already suggests a paradox. Are we meant to see in this piece an allusion to immigration and attempts to move according to the traditional south-to-north flow? The soundtrack (souns from Gdansk’s shipyards) adds a dramatic note to these relatively static images in any case.

The title of the piece Can You Hear Me? (2018-2020) comes from an animated film done in 2018 that dealt with a young girl, a minor, who had been raped and killed but whom no one had heard scream. This voice of the dispossessed that is not heard or deliberately ignored is expressed in different registers that range from irony to the absurd, and is accompanied by bright colors and quick sounds. Malani calls this complex installation an “animation room that contains the voices in [her] head and [her] heart, simulating the way [her] mind functions as ordered chaos.” The starting point for these drawings done with her finger on an iPad is often a quotation (notably by Bertolt Brecht, George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Milan Kundera, or Mohammed El Faiz). The sequences of images, texts, and sounds jostle one another and tumble out, making us gradually realize that what is being talked about is violence, injustice, fundamentalism, discrimination, and destruction of the environment.

The entire body of work by the Mexican artist Teresa Margolles revolves around the theme of death. The pieces of cloth spread out over light boxes, a bit as though they were lying on dissection tables, are soaked in the blood and other bodily fluids of women murdered in different Latin American ountries (Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua). Associations of politically committed women were invited to embroider motifs typical of their culture (Mayan, for example, in Nkijak b’ey Pa jun utz laj K’aslemal (Opening Paths to Social Justice), 2012-2015) on these lengths of cloth in an act of ommemoration and revolt. According to the artist, the project is built around the concept of resistance. These works of art are not only terrifying tokens of femicides (even more physically trying under the “sun umbrella” on the museum’s second floor, Frazada (La Sombra), Blanket (The Shade), 2016), they are also concrete examples of the struggle against the violence, a kind of silent activism, reparations by and through culture.

These six gigantic prints were selected by Muholi in the series Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail to You, Black Lioness), which was begun in 2014 and today comprises over 100 photographs in the form of self-portraits. The South African LGBTQI+ artist and “visual activist” is transformed into different depictions of Black females by means of various adornments and other makeshift headdresses, each time making, as they put it, a “reference to a particular case, historical figure, or personal, sociopolitical, or cultural experience.” Muholi does not depict these women, they embody them. The often ridiculous objects the artist sports and the foregrounding of cliches do not manage to cancel out the serious scope of the message, underscored by the piercing look in the artist’s eyes, condemning racial and sexual discrimination. The artist’s series of photographs is “like a gigantic pride event all by itself.”

When World War I broke out, Félix Vallotton volunteered to fight but was rejected because of his age. It was only in 1917 that he was able to get to the front “on an artistic mission to the armies.” The six woodcuts making up the collection « C’est la Guerre ! » (1915-1916) depict the tragic fate of the soldiers in the trenches and the sufferings of civilians near the battle lines, yet they are not based on lived experiences. These prints are rather attempts (virtuosic ones!) to form scenes of destruction through the imagination of a person who is at once horrified and fascinated by modern dehumanized faceless warfare. Dead soldiers caught in the jagged tangle of barbed wire, the explosion of shells, scenes of orgies and rapes become the motifs of nearly abstract compositions in black and white conjuring up a world of shadows. Images of chaos that are superbly arranged.