Art Basel diary: “The DJ plays Sisqó’s Thong Song, and what’s left to do other than shake our bottoms?”

Now that I am sitting by the Mediterranean beach at my mom’s place, I’m finally able to digest what happened last week. Firstly, Basel Basel is very far from Art Basel Miami Beach. There are no gun ads flying over the quaint Rhine; you don’t need to worry about zigzagging between parties since mainland traffic is a very December problem; and on the downside, turns out Twist (Miami’s premier queer club) culture is not a thing—in fact, looking for a Basel gay bar with any big Twist energy remains a futile endeavour.

A charm of the Art Basel brand is in the massive chasm between its headquartered town and its largest outpost: one is a slow-paced, moneyed and elegantly-bridged Swiss town that dazzles fair freaks with fresh-yet-warm June sunsets; the other is the world’s party capital with a nonstop summer, fun museums, and storefronts displaying aggressively hedonism-forward neon-hued attire. The charm of Art Basel Basel is its own particular kind, a blend of constantly-restored bafflement about how the world’s most ambitious art fair fits into a city with the population of Williamsburg and the old-world synergy of buying art and sausage under the same Herzog & de Meuron-designed roof.

Monday

An indispensable joy of the Basel Monday for long-haul travellers is spending the first half of the day visiting museums when your body still thinks it’s time to hit the hay, but, as it turns out, Dan Flavin hits differently when you are high on jet lag. After an Americano—which I hope will make a difference—at my and pretty much everyone’s favourite Basel cafe Unternehmen Mitte, I stroll to Kunstmuseum to see Flavin neons beaming in different shades at the museum’s relatively newer Christ & Gantenbein-designed expansion. Some are there for the grid content and others to catch up with a long-distance friend (or both). At Kunsthalle, Toyin Ojih Odutola has a beautiful solo show, titled ‘Ilé Oriaku’, with semi-abstracted new drawings in sculptural frames. At the museum’s bookstore, I don’t miss the chance to check out her Rizzoli monograph in which I have an interview with the artist next to a Zadie Smith essay. While I’m giving myself a pat on the back, I run into my friend Luiz Guilherme Rodrigues from Mendes Wood DM and the gallery’s New York director Audrey Rose Smith.

Next, I head to the fair’s little press thingy at the Merian Hotel which is also one of this year’s venues for outside programming. The hotel not only hosted talks throughout the fair but also beamed at night (and will continue until January) with Petrit Halilaj’s facade installation of stars. This year, Basel’s site-specific Parcours section is curated by Swiss Institute’s Stefanie Hessler, for which artists have taken over storefronts between the hotel and the fair. After a glass of rosé (I think? I was still jet lagged), May from Art Basel’s Communications team and I hit the road for the Unlimited which always opens a day before the main fair. Along the way, we stop at Pol Taburet’s installation at a pharmacy and encounter tourists who are probably confused by the number of passersby wearing the same accordion-like pleated polyester pants and shirts.

As usual, the queue for Unlimited is impossible to brave even with a first-choice VIP card, but my May is my Samantha Jones for the day and sneaks me from the backdoor. Unlimited is majestic as always with 70 larger-than-life works and a continuing legacy of epic performance art (which never has the same pop in the tightly-packed main section). This year’s spectacle is Anna Uddenberg’s Premium Economy, a group of aeroplane seat-cum-dentist chair sculptures activated by women performers, co-presented by Meredith Rosen Gallery and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler. As the dancers put themselves into contortions that are even more uncomfortable than those we perform on transatlantic economy flights, the crowd grows like impatient passengers at a Ryanair flight gate. Like many, I try, unsuccessfully, to find my name in Allan McCallum’s mammoth wall installation of 1200 inkjets that spell out the world’s most common names by numbers. No matter, my name is on a few party guest lists and the night is young (in this timezone at least).

First stop is Marianne Boesky Gallery’s scenic gathering at Club de Bâle. First stop is Marianne Boesky Gallery’s scenic gathering at Club de Bâle, overlooking the Mittlere bridge which is dressed with Rirkrit Tiravanija’s flags. I pair orange wine and chilled pea with a catchup with Art Basel Miami Beach director Bridget Finn—we are both fans of the idea to bring Parcours to downtown! Next is Pace Gallery’s also scenic bash at Amber Bar where I am greeted with the week’s most uplifting surprise: the bartender is offering Select, Aperol’s better-yet-less-celebrated Venice Biennale stable sister. I catch the tail end of Hauser & Wirth’s garden reception at Antikenmuseum in celebration of their new Basel space. The inaugural show is dedicated to Vilhelm Hammershøi, an allusive 19th-century Danish painter of spectral interiors. The finale is Thaddaeus Ropac’s annual dinner at Safran Zunft. Upstairs at the restaurant’s soaringly flamboyant hall, a trio of musicians yields live cocktail tunes minutes before we’ve even had a chance to scan the place cards. My dinner mates are the Guggenheim Venice curator Gražina Subelyté and London-based French art advisor Liberte Nuti. We bite on white asparagus and talk about Guggenheim’s rather gay Cocteau show and my favorite Venetian bar Vino Vero.

Tuesday

Last year, many art-worlders could be spotted taking a quick pre-fair swim (or drift) in the Rhine; this year, the weather was less accommodating. The fair’s first preview day means 10 am champagne while huddled in Messe’s interior garden. I catch up with my friend Camille Desprez from Galerie Templon about Chiharu Shiota’s massive red thread installation in Unlimited (the artist will present a similar scale iteration at Grand Palais this fall). It is 11:02am and the marathon starts. By this point, I’m sure you’ve seen more than enough ‘best booth guides about the fair proper, but one I must talk about is Shanghai’s BANK. The gallery owner Mathieu Borysevicz tells me about the fearless love story between the two late artists, Maryn Varbanov and Song Huai-Kuei. Maryn—a Bulgarian fabric artist—was sent to reform-era China as a foreign exchange student, where met Song. They had to write a letter to a high level Chinese official to grant them, as an international couple, the permit to get married. The booth includes their wall tapestries, some of which were owned by their longtime champion, Pierre Cardin. I rush back across the street to Unlimited to watch a performance collaboration between star set designer Es Devlin and wild choreographer Sharon Eyal whose work Soul Chain I had seen in New York last year—and my breath was taken. BMW invited Devlin to design an installation for their annual booth and she tapped Eyal for a mesmerizing rain-induced show in which tip-toed dancers sway behind a curtain of water. At the Fair partners Turkish Airlines’ annual commission is with Refik Anadol titled Inner Portrait. The AI artist welcomes an engaged crowd, including Ernesto Neto, Maja Hoffman, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ralph Nauta of DRIFT, into the psychedelic installation. The warping rain of countless orbits captures the recorded emotional data of four first-time travellers which Anadol tracked before, during, and after their maiden trips abroad. “We started at their homes to discuss what home means before heading to their dream location,” Anadol tells me as his generative work’s fiery red and bright green colours wash our faces.

The dinner is with the BMW team, including Devlin and Eyal, at Volkhaus, perhaps the second social temple of fair week after the bar at the Hotel Les Trois Rois which this year is wrapped with a grey scaffolding. Sad. I reserve nightcaps for two parties: first, Karma and Mendes Wood DM’s joint celebration at an unassuming rooftop where I run into my friend Kurdish-Turkish German painter Melike Kara. I’ve been a fan of her paintings of ghostly abstracted bodies since I saw her New York debut at Salon 94 six years ago. To my great excitement, she tells me she will have a New York solo at Bortolami this January. With Frieze friends Charlotte Birkett and Carlotta Dennis-Lovaglio, and Maggie Carrigan and Naomi Rea from Artnet I head to Perrotin’s annual party at the town’s cathedral, Elisabethenkirche. At almost 1 am, the party still holds its momentum, and after the DJ puts Sisqó’s Thong Song, what is left to do other than shake our bottoms with the disco lights hitting the Neo-Gothic wooden saints.

Wednesday

A standout at Liste fair, a manageable single-floor affair where every gallery receives a same-size booth, is New York gallery Margot Samel’s Melissa Joseph show. The layout features a new suite of felted wool paintings that incorporate found accordions and first aid boxes. Joseph tells me she started playing the aerophone instruments in her early 30s with a band in suburban Maryland. The soft paintings are based on the artist’s photographs, including one that shows Samel’s son playing an accordion. Joseph later DM’ed me to add: “I needed some levity, and while I love accordions, they are inherently quirky but also warm and robust.”

I am back at Messeplatz where I pop into Design Miami/ across the street. I’m greeted by an homage to Radical design giant Gaetano Pesce who died in April. Friedman Benda, Pulp Galerie, and downtown+ each presents work by the maestro, such as a ruby-coloured Arca desk and the I Feltri chair which combines the heft of a throne with the cushiony comfort of an upholstery. Then, I head to the brand new Art Basel Shop at the Unlimited entrance, curated by the Parisian cult boutique Collette’s founder Sarah Andelman. The store includes a commission with Christine Sun Kim who designed clothes, posters, clock faces, stamps and pocket mirrors adorned with her signature drawings. I briefly sit with Andelman who dons JW Anderson’s infamous I TOLD YA t-shirt, and she shares with me that she didn’t “think twice” about the fair’s invitation. “I love a Murakami toy or a Koons puppy but one rule I have for this shop is to bring together objects no one has seen before or forgotten about.” Back on Clarastrasse, I find myself at a mall with fabric stores, nail salons, and empty storefronts. I’m here for London-based Mandy El-Sayegh’s Parcours presentation upstairs, Body Promise, which includes a wrapping installation of newspaper, packaging, faux money, and advertisement clippings. El-Sayegh activates the alarmingly chaotic but somehow calm orchestration with a performance that feels poetic and disturbing. Dancers, including herself, wear white ghostly hazmat suits while darkness and light blend with joy towards life and protest against numbness. The artist tells me she is “always fascinated by the city after dark,” and remembers filming semi-disused malls when she grew up in Malaysia. “It all lined up perfectly in this case, as you have to ask permission from the site’s spirits, and be cognizant of the context when intervening,” she adds.

Another Basel week comes to an end with the Vitra’s summer party which is technically in Germany on the opposite side of the border. The massive campus dons buildings by marquee starchitects, like Zaha Hadid, Jean Prouvé and Álvaro Siza where perhaps 1,000 guests are living their own version of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Okay, I need to sleep!