That the satellite fair of Art Basel, with a focus on the freshest proposals on the market, needed a good overhaul was known to all the unfortunate visitors who last year found themselves pawns in an uninspiring game of snakes and ladders. With their eyes still full of the impeccable sections of Art Basel, in fact, we found ourselves welcomed into a place that had all the air of a badly done joke, with a circular “biscione” of a stand worthy of the imaginative public housing of the 70s.
The projects and commitment of the gallery owners – the luckiest ones, within the circle, forced to look at each other for an entire week – were not enough to lift what, with all possible caution, could be defined as a rather unfortunate edition.
Given the premises, seasoned with a horrifying international situation that is certainly not functional to investments, one could not have expected the recovery that was instead found, also thanks to the intervention of the new director Nikola Dietrich, who was able to restore vigor and coherence to a fair of undoubted strategic importance. Liste in fact has the difficult task and the desirable objective of being a projection towards the art of the future, shedding light on practices and attitudes not yet chewed and digested by an international market that, by incorporating, levels and smooths the edges.
The careful selection, the preference for monographic exhibitions and a display more functional to a visit, as intimate as possible, to the stands, have contributed to supporting the structure of this thirtieth edition, which has proved to be one of the strongest in recent years. Of course, the same spirit of disruption was not found in the pavilion next door, where the artists of the Swiss Art and Swiss Design Awards were truly able to play freely with spaces and ideas without having to answer to a gallery owner who, before even starting the fair, found himself with several tens of thousands of euros less in his account. However, with the necessary prudence of those who must also and above all sell art, the proposals were varied, within studied and above all well-set-up projects. It was almost a relief for the eyes to rediscover the pleasure of a beautiful exhibition balance, with that rigor that comes from the strength of an idea presented to the market and not fully suggested by it. Starting, for example, from the Bombon Projects gallery in Barcelona whose courageous installation of metal and earth sculptures – balanced with delicate assonances by Joana Escoval (1982, Lisbon) – was rewarded by the support of Friends of Liste with a discount on the participation fee. The same harmony was then found in the organic exhibition of the Athenian Callirrhoë, with the terracotta and ceramic works of Paky Vlassopoulou (1985, Athens) that seem to suggest new possible narratives starting from isolated fragments, like pieces of suspended meaning. Also singular and successful was the installation of Clima, a Milanese gallery that reconfirms its participation in Liste, with the ethereal and refined works of Sacha Kanah (1981, Milan), composed of a transparent structure of kelp algae, which, like floating organisms, direct research towards new evolutionary projections.
Among the best, also the well-distributed stand of the New Yorker Silke Lindner with the dismantled and re-adapted musical instruments of Gozié Ojini (1995, Los Angeles), which, starting from a material dimension, allude to the recovery and re-elaboration of the sound heritage of African-American musical traditions. If on the one hand, the Öktem Aykut project, based in Istanbul, confirmed its high quality, with the intriguing photographic works of Samuel Laurence Cunnane (1989, Co. Kerry, Ireland) and the re-examined objets trouvés of Selim Birsel (1963, Brussels), also Yeo Workshop from Singapore, at its first participation, was able to involve with the delicacy of the love messages translated by Aki Hassan (1995, Singapore) in paintings and sculptures in which the ambivalent and at times contrasting feelings that distinguish every human relationship emerge.
In line with the trend of recent years, then, a great deal of space was reserved for painting, starting from the Bucharest gallery, Suprainfinit – winner of the FEAGA Innovation and Creativity Award – which presented the works of Miruna Radovici (1995, Bucharest), in which human and animal unite in the subtle restlessness of an existence in balance, then proceeding with the structural complexities that dissect attitudes and conventions of Evangeline Turner (1996, London) from a. SQUIRE, to arrive at the lucid and sharp look at prosaic details of everyday life in the paintings of the young Anna Clegg (1998, London) for which the gallery owner of the Berlin gallery Schiefe Zähne has started to talk about a waiting list.
Parallel to the exhibition, a program of daily talks and workshops helped to sustain the critical debate, making even more engaging a fair that in itself has succeeded in the difficult task of surprising the eye without shocking it, suggesting a type of approach to the market in which it is art that, with caution, approaches the customer and not collecting that shapes already known proposals that repeat themselves servilely similar to themselves.
