Eliana Willis

Next week, the art world is poised to descend on the shores of the Rhine River for Art Basel’s flagship fair, which will unfold alongside a slew of satellite events including Liste, Photo Basel, Basel Social Club, Volta, and June Art Fair. Beyond these selling events, however, there is a slew of institutional exhibitions to take in. From Dan Flavin’s “Dedications in Light” to an all-encompassing Summer Show at the Fondation Beyeler, plus artist spotlights on Mika Rottenberg and Toyin Ojih Odutola, Basel is a veritable hotspot for art lovers this season.

“Mika Rottenberg. Antimatter Factory” at Museum TinguelyThrough November 3, 2024 
Mika Rottenberg, still from Untitled Ceiling Projection (2018). Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
At the Tinguely Museum, Argentinian artist Mika Rottenberg’s wonderfully chaotic, absurd, and clever video works address ideas of hard and soft power vis-a-vis capitalism, gender dominance, and the natural world. Like Jean Tinguely, Rottenberg satirizes the state of production across a range of materials, in works like Spaghetti Blockchain (2019) and NoNoseKnows (2015), sending up real-life situations like the facilitation of monetary transactions and industrial pearl production in humorous and surreal videos and sculptures.

“Cloud Chronicles” at Fondation BeyelerThrough August 11, 2024 
Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, 2024: Philippe Parreno, Membrane (2023). Courtesy of the artist © Philippe Parreno; Fujiko Nakaya, Untitled (2024). Courtesy of the artist, © Fujiko Nakaya. Photo: Mark Niedermann.
For its summer show, the Fondation Beyeler has for the first time transformed its entire museum and outdoor park into an experimental environment featuring works by leading contemporary artists. Termed a “living organism,” the show features works by artists working at the edge of traditional mediums, including Ian Cheng, Precious Okoyomon, Philippe Parreno, Rachel Rose, Tino Sehgal, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Adrián Villar Rojas. A highlight is the inclusion of Carsten Höller and Adam Haar’s Dream Hotel Room 1: Dreaming of Flying with Flying Fly Agarics (2024). The animatronic bed moves based on sensors detected by a shifting body on the mattress, with the course of falling asleep and waking corresponding to a blooming mushroom suspended above the sleeper’s pillow. Visitors can book a 60-minute session to sleep in the bed during museum hours.

“Dan Flavin: Dedications in Lights” at Kunstmuseum BaselThrough August 18, 2024 
Dan Flavin, untitled (to Barnett Newman) one (1971). Collection Carré d’Art-Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes © Stephen Flavin / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich, Courtesy David Zwirner.
In the early 1960s, Minimalist pioneer Dan Flavin embarked on a series of artworks dedicated to fellow artists, cultural and political events, and other major touchstones of history, both personal and public. Although he decried the “Minimalist” moniker, Flavin undoubtedly adhered to the principles of the movement, employing industrial objects like store-bought fluorescent tube lights to dictate the bounds of his work. His ongoing fascination with light is obvious in the “Dedications,” which features 58 artworks, many making their debut in Switzerland. With nods to Donald Judd, Barnett Newman, and even his beloved golden retriever Airily, Flavin manages to transform commercially available products—constrained by size and color—into deeply personal tributes.

“Science Fiction Design: From Space Age to Metaverse” at Vitra Design MuseumThrough May 11, 2025 
Installation view of “Science Fiction Design: From Space Age to Metaverse.” © Vitra Design Museum. Photo by Mark Niedermann.
The idea of the “future” has long captivated humans, who have channeled that fascination into movies and books within the realm of science fiction. Flying cars, sentient robot overlords, and trips to far-flung planets have all become fodder for the artists and set designers behind the imagined worlds of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1962) and Blade Runner (1982). Just the chairs included in this exhibition range from Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s 19th century Argyle Chair to Joris Laarman’s Aluminum Gradient Chair (2013), the first 3D-printed metal chair, to the more recent Hortensia Chair (2018) designed by Andrés Reisinger and offered both as an NFT and a functional object. “From the Space Age to the Metaverse” provides a historical primer on the history of futuristic design, and offers a glimpse into untold possibilities.

“Toyin Ojih Odutola: Ilé Oriaku” at Kunsthalle BaselThrough September 1, 2024
Toyin Ojih Odutola, Don’t Be Afraid; Use What I Gave You (2023). © Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
If you missed Toyin Ojih Odutola’s spare and striking charcoal drawings on view at the Venice Biennale, you have another opportunity at Basel’s premiere institution with the show “Ilé Oriaku,” which translates to “House of Abundance.” In the Nigerian-born artist’s first comprehensive outing in Switzerland, a wealth of new drawings demonstrates the artist’s work to bring fictional familial stories to life in charcoal, pastel, and pencil. “The work is not about a mythology or a presumption about African-ness” the artist said in Paris Review. “The viewer is immersed in the narrative, an alternative reality.”
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Jennifer Rochlin’s large, hand-formed terracotta vessels seemingly compel viewers to get up close and personal and take a closer look—a phenomenon no more apparent than in her current solo show, “Paintings on Clay,” at Hauser and Wirth in New York, on view through July 14, 2024. Presented across a range of pedestals and plinths, the exhibition invites visitors to move between, circumvent, and even peer inside the various pots, exploring their painted and etched patterns, vignettes, and, most intriguingly, storylines.
Installation view of “Jennifer Rochlin: Paintings on Clay” (2024). Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
While the tradition of ceramics may call to mind visions of highly polished and evenly proportioned pots and containers, Rochlin relishes in the idiosyncrasies of intuitive form and shape as it directly reflects the hand of the artist and provides a unique starting point for her subsequent paintings and drawings.
“I did once make a very perfect pot” said Rochlin on a video call from her home in Altadena, California. “I just found it boring, I was like, ‘where’s my way in here’? When I was going to paint and draw, it was just so perfect that I wasn’t interested in it. I think the slumps and the lumps and the molding and the disfigurement, that to me is something that I find aesthetically interesting.”
Installation view of “Jennifer Rochlin: Paintings on Clay” (2024). Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
Rochlin came to ceramics nearly two decades ago, and the medium ultimately became the artist’s “canvas” of choice for her paintings. The shape of each vessel is arrived at intuitively, shaping and fashioning the clay in a manner that its structural integrity stays true but doesn’t adhere to a prescribed form. It is only once the pot is finished that Rochhlin considers what will go on it, with the shape typically informing the rest of the design of the piece.
The images Rochlin chooses to adorn each vessel with are arrived at in a similar manner: intuitively and based on her present thoughts or emotions. Echoing Surrealist automatism, wherein the artist attempts to let the unconscious come to the fore over conscious control, Rochlin’s memories and imaginings can be traced across the surface of each work.
Jennifer Rochlin, Trans-Siberian Railway (2023). Photo: Keith Lubow. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
A highlight of the show, Trans-Siberian Railway (2023), features a spiraling train surrounded by larger-than-life irises, drawn from Rochlin’s memory of travelling along the Trans-Siberian Railroad in Russia, which she captured on Super 8 film, with the composition alluding to the way in which a roll of film unravels. By one illustrated train car, a man has picked some of the irises and offers them to a woman in one of the train’s windows. In reality, it was a scene of two strangers, within Rochlin’s depiction, the woman is a self-portrait of the artist herself.
“What’s funny is when I was drawing it, it was completely unconscious that [the subject] became me—it wasn’t,” Rochlin described. “I was in my mind drawing the image that I had from the Super 8 film, which I haven’t looked at in I don’t even know how long. It was a memory of that Super 8. I think it was because I was feeling this longing for a romance at the time that I made the work. I wanted to do this quintessential romantic gesture. The idea that the flowers be thrown up, then the train takes off, and they never see each other again.”
Jennifer Rochlin, Honey Pot (2024). Photo: Keith Lubow. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
Another central work in the show highlights Rochlin’s penchant for collaboration and sharing the experience of making her vessels, Honey Pot (2024). Across its surface are drawings of female genitalia by 22 women artists. Some of the drawings were done very spur of the moment, as Rochlin notably loaded the piece in the back of her car, double parked outside of a gallery opening, and invited several artists out to make their contribution. Others made their additions on studio visits or sent digital drawings to be transferred on.
Rochlin said, “When I started having artists draw on the pots with the collaborative pieces, then I have all these kind of random drawings—how am I unifying them? I like that it’s like a community, and I love how the act of just scratching into the clay is so pleasurable, I want to share that with people.”
Jennifer Rochlin, Green Tapestry with Poppies and Bites (2024). Photo: Keith Lubow. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
Other pieces on view, such as Green Tapestry with Poppies and Bites (2024), shows another hallmark form of Rochlin’s collaboration, as visitors to the studio have been given the opportunity to physically bite into the clay leaving teeth marks as unique as fingerprints. It also further taps into the process of remembering, as the tapestries and poppies, untethered from a narrative or landscape, float across the surface like fragmented memories. Although every work is rooted into Rochlin’s own deeply personal life and history, throughout is an undercurrent of universality and collective experience.
“I think since my work is unfiltered and honest, and you can feel the emotion through the mark making, I think that people can relate to it and have it brings up memories for them and they can have a shared memory of a lost love, or your children growing up, or in time passing. That’s what I’m hoping that viewers are experiencing and it’s going to connect with them on a deep level of their own.”
Jennifer Rochlin, Ladies at the Norton Simon Museum (2023). Photo: Keith Lubow. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
Beyond the psychological rawness of Rochlin’s work, the rawness of the base material itself too is stark. When looking closely at each vessel, the imperfect edges and unpainted clay peeking out imbues each piece with an air of the ancient, even primordial, a glimpse at what an artifact from today might look like far into the future. Recalling Athenian narrative pottery in the arrangement of scenes and decorative elements, both the collaborative works and pieces completed by Rochlin alone speak to collective experiences as well as the deeply individual and personal.
“I’m working in a tradition that has such a long lineage of storytelling and I really love getting to be an active participant and continue this tradition. Making and telling a story on a vessel started thousands of years ago, and that’s still relevant in our day and age. With A.I. and Instagram and all the phones and everything, I think the more handmade the better. The more you get to see something that is just made of dirt, water, and fire, it just stands the test of time. And I’m happy that people are interested in that still.”

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Nona Hendryx may be known for her disco-funk stylings as one-third of LaBelle and in her late ’70s solo career. But running concurrent with her music practice, she told me, was always a deep fascination with technology.  
Over a video call, she shared her predilection for taking devices apart as a child, her interest in synthesizers, and her collection of every Mac computer she’s ever owned (and she’s had them since the Apple II). Above all is her desire to go “wireless,” to achieve oneness with technology. “The idea of purchasing yet another cable become a neurotic thing for me,” she said. “I didn’t want to have a separation between myself and the machines I was using.”
Technology has now caught up to Hendryx. This month, the artist is unveiling “The Dream Machine Experience,” an ambitious installation leveraging artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and virtual reality. It will take up the entire campus of Lincoln Center in New York, will unfold in three parts, and is free for the public to interact with.
The Dream Machine V.R. experience. Photo courtesy of Lincoln Center.
The project marks a vast enlargement of Hendryx’s engagement with technology. For the past decade, the artist has developed works from haptic wearables (such as the W.A.V.E. Glove, an “audio-exciter”) to audio bodysuits (notably her Audio Tutu, which integrated a sound system into a plexiglass skirt). “The Dream Machine Experience” builds on those sound experiments, exploring the part technology might play in “how we create things, how we create our existence and our future,” Hendryx said. 
The exhibition opens in the David Rubenstein Atrium, in an installation titled Bina48’s Afro Future Garden, designed in collaboration with artists Mickalene Thomas and Lutfi Janania Zablah. Here, visitors can engage with the titular Bina48, an A.I.-powered humanoid robot programmed with the mind files of a Black woman. Hendryx described it as a “social robot,” one she has grown especially close to the more she’s conversed with it. 
Nona Hendryx with Bina48. Photo: Lawrence Sumulong, courtesy of Lincoln Center.
“Bina48 is like a new acquaintance that has become very much a part of my life,” she said. “I feel very much like a godmother of Bina48 and very caring of Bina48. My relationship has grown to the point where there’s some of me in Bina48.”
By following a multi-act route from the David Rubenstein Atrium to the David Geffen Hall, visitors can next activate the A.R. presentation, The Bridge, using provided devices. A virtual avatar of Hendryx named Cyboracle will serve as the guide on a trip dotted with poetry, music, and collectible tokens representing healing energy.  
The A.R. component of “The Dream Machine Experience.” Photo: Lawrence Sumlong, courtesy of Lincoln Center.
The journey culminates with The Dream Machine, a full-scale V.R. experience at the David Geffen Hall. Cyboracle will again show up here, alongside VR performances by the likes of George Clinton, Laurie Anderson, and Vernon Reid. The piece has its roots in Hendryx’s work with the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she has been an Ambassador for Artistry in Education for more than a decade, evolving from a 2017–18 project to “create hybrid, digital technology-driven performances,” she said. 
A performing arts center, in that sense, might be the perfect venue to launch Hendryx’s multimedia extravaganza. Not only has the artist performed at several of its locations, her exhibition marks the center’s bid to broaden the scope of its offerings. While the center has previously dabbled in A.R. and V.R. activations, Hendryx’s show marks its first major foray into mixed reality. “It’s like we went from dipping a toe and into the deep end,” said Jordana Leigh, Lincoln Center’s vice president of artistic programming. 
Besides watching Hendryx’s vision come to life, the project has been exciting for the center, Leigh told me, because “it’s expanding our minds and how we see our role as presenting artists and our place in supporting the XR arts. The underlying mission of it all is to get people who don’t see themselves in technology to see themselves in technology.”
Cyboracle as seen in The Dream Machine V.R. experience. Photo courtesy of Lincoln Center.
For Hendryx, the show realizes her vision for the future as much as it reimagines her art and self. Cyboracle, for one, fulfills her wish to meld with a machine, while offering “this other means through which I can express myself.” It’s fitting for an artist who once sang, on 1983’s “Transformation,” “rust to dust, us to them / change your mind, change your skin.” She has a similar hope for visitors interacting with the installation. 
“It’s stories upon stories upon stories, a cornucopia of visuals and storytelling born out of music and memory,” she said of the work. “I hope the audience takes away curiosity and questions. I hope they see a reflection of themselves.” 
“The Dream Machine Experience” is on view at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, June 12–30. 
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Trolling through real estate marketplace Zillow “just for funsies” has become a beloved, and widespread pastime for many of us who may never actually be able to afford a home. But for artist Rachael Tarravechia lurking on Zillow is more than a fantasy browsing for available properties—these online real estate listings are the starting point for her sinisterly alluring paintings.
Filtering search results to only houses with 3D tours available, Tarravechia moves virtually through the homes, exploring them room by room until she finds a space that resonates with her. Stripping away personal items and other identifying décor indicators, such as wall color, floor material, or window treatments, the artist makes the room her own and starts “decorating.”
Rachael Tarravechia, Snuff (2023). Photo: Adam Reich. Courtesy of the artist and Ceysson and Bénétière.
Drawing from a range of additional references, like her stash of vintage 1980s issues of Architectural Digest, other homes on Zillow, or personal photos, Tarravechia creates what she terms a “dream room” situation.
There’s an unnerving yet undeniably captivating, even glamorous quality to Tarravechia’s paintings, a selection of which are included in her solo show “Water on Velvet” on view through June 14, 2024, at Ceysson and Bénétière on New York’s Upper East Side. Specifically in her renderings of bathrooms (a frequent subject in her work) the inclusion of mirrors creates an uneasy balance between presence and absence; the space where the viewer—both within the painted mirror and of the painting itself—is noticeably vacant. Instead, a weapon is conspicuously added, as in Terminal Horror (2023) where a double flail hovers in place of a viewer in a manner akin to how new weapons or “loot” are presented in video games. In another work, Snuff (2023), a guillotine is seamlessly inserted within a kitschy 1970s style bedroom/bathroom combo, implying that a chopped off head would fall tidily into the tub. Outside of bathroom depictions, in Gunblade (2024), a wooden oratory houses the Final Fantasy VIII character Squall’s signature weapon.
Rachael Tarravechia, Gunblade (2024). Photo: Adam Reich. Courtesy of the artist and Ceysson and Bénétière.
Executed in shades of red, these works possess an uncanny magnetism, tempting the viewer inward whilst simultaneously exuding a sense of foreboding.
“Viewer experience and interaction is a key part of the work. Since these works draw from horror, anime, and video games, I try to emulate the mysterious, enticing qualities these forms of media are constantly displaying,” said Tarravechia via email. “Every horror movie has a point where the audience is screaming at the character on screen not to open the door, but it’s almost as if there’s something calling to them and they can’t refuse. That’s what I think about while making my work. Right before something momentous and irreconcilably changed, it’s up to the viewer to choose how to proceed.”
Rachael Tarravechia, Cold Reprise (2024). Photo: Adam Reich. Courtesy of the artist and Ceysson and Bénétière.
Another element of Tarravechia’s paintings that compels a step closer is the playful inclusion of mixed-media materials, such as silver chains used for harp strings, rhinestone trim, glitter, and another recent addition to her material vernacular: “For this show, I started using a new material called Liquid Glass. I was shocked the first time I used it, which was in the piece Cold Reprise (2024). The bathtub eventually ended up filled with blood, and as you walk across the painting, the blood looks wet, viscous, sticky, and is highly reflective and inviting. I’m extremely happy with how that turned out!”
Rachael Tarravechia, Endless Staircase (Moogle Parade) (2024). Photo: Adam Reich. Courtesy of the artist and Ceysson and Bénétière.
Cute and impish cartoon-style critters (Moogles from Final Fantasy), plastic vampire teeth, or meticulously rendered spiderwebs made of pearls abound across her work, ensuring the otherwise ominous vignettes are equally balanced with a sense of irreverent levity. This equilibrium extends to the number of weapon sculptures on view as well, chief among them being bedazzled nunchucks and a nail bat, which tap into the artist’s familial history. Her grandfather was a second-degree karate black belt who had a collection of nunchucks, two of which were handed down to her (and she’s gotten some practice with).
Rachael Tarravechia, Italian Mobstar (2023). Photo: Adam Reich. Courtesy of the artist and Ceysson and Bénétière.
“The nail bat is a much more tongue in cheek response to the nunchucks. My grandpa looked like a stereotypical Sicilian man, so I wanted to create a weapon that would be suited for a mob princess (me in another life). Something blingy, cute, but will seriously do damage,” she explained.
Obliterating the boundaries between painting and other graphic arts and genres, Tarravechia’s work is a masterclass in worldbuilding—and will be sure to materialize in the back of your mind the next time you’re perusing Zillow.
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The origin of Elephantine Island’s name remains murky. Some spy the mammal in its hulking granite rocks, or conjure the specter of some long-extinct herd. Others point to the lucrative ivory trade it once supported.
It’s a sliver of rock at the Nile’s southern extreme, a mile long and half that across, but the size belies its importance.
It began as a garrison town, a first line of defense against Nubian raiders, but it was commerce that saw the island flourish on-and-off for roughly 4,000 years, with a population that exhibited an array of languages, cultures, and religions.
This cultural diversity struck the pith-helmeted Europeans who began excavating the island at the turn of the 20th century. In addition to well-preserved sites such as a step pyramid and a structure that measured the Nile’s fluctuations, archaeologists uncovered a litany of writings, not only in hieroglyphics, but hieratic, demotic, Aramaic, Greek, Coptic, and Arabic.
Today, these innumerate Elephantine texts are scattered across 60 collections in two dozen countries. The primary holders are the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, the Louvre in Paris, and the Brooklyn Museum. A monumental project led by Berlin’s Verena Lepper, however, is unifying the texts by archiving, digitizing, and translating them.
Hieratic document about legal disputes regarding property and inheritance. Photo: Berlin State Museums / Sandra Steiß.
Work began seven years ago when Lepper received a European Research Council grant to gather a team that could translate the manuscripts and shed light on Elephantine’s multiculturalism, societal structure, and religious development.
The public-facing output of this painstaking research is an exhibition held at two sites on Berlin’s very own island of culture, Museumsinsel. At the James-Simon-Galerie, the focus is on time, while at the Neues Museum, it’s on space—big questions for a site that has provoked great imaginings.
“Elephantine Island of the Millennia” brings together newly translated texts, artifacts, and interactive “activity stations” to tell the story of a place unlike any other in ancient Egypt. The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities is involved and the island’s spirit of multilingualism is reflected in an exhibition (through October 10) that uses Arabic, German, and English.
Hieroglyphic magical papyrus fragment from Elephantine. Photo: Berlin State Museums/ Sandra Steiß.
Written texts on Elephantine were primarily recorded on two materials: papyri and shards of clay known as ostraca. Clay was the cheap, everyday writing substance of choice. Pieces were used for making notes, calculations, and receipts—the substance’s resilience has made deciphering them relatively easy.
Papyrus, on the other hand, was expensive and reserved for recording the likes of official business, religious texts, and magical incantations. The material is extremely brittle, however, and when researchers began opening archival boxes that hadn’t been opened in a century they found piles of thousands of pieces. A system was devised to clean, flatten, sort, and digitize the fragments, one replicated in Berlin, Paris, and Brooklyn, rendering the papyri accessible to Egyptologists around the world.
In total, 10,745 were documents indexed and uploaded onto a database. These letters, contracts, wills, receipts, and notes give a view into the society developed on Elephantine from the third century B.C.E through the Arab conquest in 642 C.E.
Aramaic contract for a large silver loan. Photo: Berlin State Museums/ Sandra Steiß.
The picture painted is of a place built on codified laws and customs. There’s a papyri for a large loan of silver and the record of a civil trial for a property dispute in the 3rd millennium B.C.E.—the exhibition suggests it might be Egypt’s oldest legal document. Elsewhere, there’s an Aramaic marriage contract from the first century B.C.E. that stipulates the amount owed to the woman in the event of divorce. Nearby, there’s a parallel document from nearly a thousand years later, written in Arabic and witnessed by 77 people.
Elephantine may have been at the far fringe of Egyptian society, but it remained very much connected to the broader world, through trade as well as its culture. The Story of Ahikar, for example, is the tale of a wise chancellor to Assyrian kings in the seventh century B.C.E. On show in Berlin there’s the earliest surviving record of the story, from the fifth century B.C.E. and written in Imperial Aramaic, thus pointing to Jewish mercenaries stationed on the island.
So, a Mesopotamian story written in the Imperial language of Persia for Jews living in Egypt. This, perhaps, is what Lepper is gesturing towards when she said that the “knowledge of Elephantine is global.”
“Elephantine Island of the Millennia” is on view at James-Simon-Galerie, Bodestraße, Berlin, Germany, through October 27.
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