What connects a performance featuring several pounds of tofu, a sculpture incorporating human hair, and Pop art lithographs of swanky interiors? They're all works on view in 'OVR: Portals', Art Basel's latest Online Viewing Rooms – and the first overseen by curators. Read on to discover seven artists - from Chinese painters to Italian filmmakers - featured in this edition led by Magali Arriola, Christina Li, and Larry Ossei-Mensah.
White Cube (London and Hong Kong) will present works by Mona Hatoum and Tracey Emin. Both artists draw on themes of love, desire, loss, and grief to examine identity and selfhood – often through an exploration of the human body itself. Emin is known for her autobiographical and confessional work, an array of which will be included in this presentation. She explicitly and unabashedly addresses intimate topics like pregnancy, illness, and abortion through drawings, photographs, found objects, and video. Through a similarly wide-ranging array of mediums, Hatoum often locates the body as a battleground and transforms everyday objects into uncanny forms. In the sculpture Exodus (2001), for example, she connects two vintage suitcases with locks of human hair. The suitcases point to human migration and movement from place to place, while the dark hair provides an undertone of disembodiment and violence. ‘I try to reveal an undercurrent of hostility within something that usually looks inoffensive,’ the artist has said. Turning a familiar form into the fulcrum of political, social, and gender conflict is a way, she says, ‘of making people question everything around them.’
Also exploring the human body is Chen Qiulin, whose most recent project will be on view at A Thousand Plateaus Art Space (Chengdu). In the experimental body project, titled Drown (2021), she melds site-specific installation, performance, live sound creation, and video to reflect on female identity and Chinese traditions. For the piece, Quilin moved around and through industrial-sized blocks of tofu on a wooden platform. While the platform becomes both a stage and a cage, alluding to the global constraints placed on movement during the pandemic, the tofu points towards her own culture and identity: Quilin is from Wanzhou in Sichuan Province, which is known for China’s most spicy tofu dishes. The artist also sees tofu – which she’s worked with since 2003 – as a symbol for material transformation through intensive labor. Moreover, Quilin typically performs alone, although for Drown she collaborated with dance artist Zheng Yuanyuan and sound artist Chen Hongli – a move away from isolation in an otherwise pandemic-related project.
Living between Germany and China, Rao Fu also reflects on our current Covid moment in his recent paintings, presented by Mind Set Art Center (Taipei). In Fu's canvases, the New Leipzig School of painting's expressive elements meet the subtle lines of Chinese ink art. His works address fundamental issues of human existence ranging from personal anxieties, as exemplified in Spiral Staircase (2021), to global migration crises, as alluded to in Totes Meer (2020). In the former, three ghostly figures appear in a grand entryway: One sits on the titular spiral staircase, hunched over; another slowly descends, also hunched; and the third is larger-than-life, reaching upwards from the ground floor. The latter piece, meanwhile, depicts a group of human-like figures floating in an allegorical totes meer, or dead sea. Fu's acidic color scheme, frantic brushstrokes, and eerie figures speak to the mental spiraling and anguish that many encountered as homes became hosts to offices, schools, isolation pods, and more.
Roy Lichtenstein’s ‘Interiors’, a series of editioned lithographs, takes on entirely new meaning when seen from our present moment. Showcased by Gemini G.E.L. (Los Angeles), the Pop artist’s meditation on domestic interiors in the early 1990s was inspired by a billboard advertisement for a furniture store he saw outside Rome. In Interior with Waterlilies (1991), for example, Lichtenstein created an image of a bedroom decorated with artworks that nod to his own previous compositions as well as Monet’s iconic series, from which this screenprint also takes its name. Gemini G.E.L.’s decision to feature Lichtenstein’s ‘Interiors’, all devoid of human presence, feels fitting for 'OVR: Portals': After a year largely confined to our own domestic spaces and to our own self-referential bubbles, many of us are aching to escape them.
Place, in addition to time, is further explored by artists Ettore Spalletti and Rosa Barba, whose works will be on view with Vistamare/Vistmarestudio (Pescara and Milan). The title of the presentation is borrowed from Barba’s 2012 film Time as Perspective, which shows oil pumps in Texas as they repeat the same mechanical movement. Their repetition and presence in an otherwise deserted landscape become meditative, transforming an exploitative, unsustainable act into one of tranquility. This work reflects Barba’s practice at large, which explores time’s relation to landscape and geology and to film itself as a time-based medium. Ettore Spalletti likewise disrupts traditional notions of limitation and confinement that are associated with time and place, but through minimal interventions and color. He conceives his art with no physical boundaries; the resulting canvases, often installed at slight angles, blur the line between two- and three-dimensional work.
‘OVR: Portals’, curated by Magali Arriola, Christina Li, and Larry Ossei-Mensah, is on view from June, 16-19 2021.
Originally written by Emily McDermott, a writer and editor living in Berlin, for Art Basel.
June 2021
