ARTISTS
14 Rooms 鈥� Live art by 14 celebrated international artists presented during Art Basel
Fondation Beyeler, Art Basel and Theater Basel are delighted to announce 鈥�14 Rooms鈥�, a major live-art exhibition to be staged in Basel from June 14 to 22, 2014. Curated by Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist, the exhibition will feature performative works by artists including Marina Abramovi膰, Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, Ed Atkins, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Damien Hirst, Joan Jonas, Laura Lima, Bruce Nauman, Otobong Nkanga, Roman Ondák, Yoko Ono, Tino Sehgal, Santiago Sierra, and Xu Zhen.
Art Basel
24 May, 2014
Re-enactments of Bruce Nauman's 1968 video Wall Floor Positions, presented at 14 Rooms in Basel by Fondation Beyeler, Art Basel, Theater Basel in 2014, MCH Messe Schweiz (Basel) AG.
Fondation Beyeler, Art Basel and Theater Basel are delighted to announce '14 Rooms', a major live-art exhibition to be staged in Basel from June 14 to 22, 2014. Curated by Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist, the exhibition will feature performative works by artists including Marina Abramovi膰, Jennifer Allora, Guillermo Calzadilla, Ed Atkins, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Damien Hirst, Joan Jonas, Laura Lima, Bruce Nauman, Otobong Nkanga, Roman Ondák, Yoko Ono, Tino Sehgal, Santiago Sierra, and Xu Zhen. Two more works join the architectural environment conceived by Herzog & de Meuron. Jordan Wolfson’s acting as an epilogue, John Baldessari’s as an archival documentation. Both challenge the very notions of live art and the human experience as set out for '14 Rooms'.
Curators Klaus Biesenbach, Director of MoMA PS1 and Chief Curator at Large at The Museum of Modern Art, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery, have invited 14 international artists to each activate a room, exploring the relationship between space, time and physicality with an artwork whose 'material' is a human being. Giving visitors an insight into a more performative and interactive practice, visitors will encounter a new situation within each of the 14 rooms, engaging in a diverse series of immersive and intimate experiences.
Otobong Nkanga, Diaspore, 2014. Presented at 14 Rooms in Basel by Fondation Beyeler, Art Basel, Theater Basel in 2014, MCH Messe Schweiz (Basel) AG.
Conceived specifically for Basel, Ed Atkins, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Otobong Nkanga will create new works for the show. Alongside these world premieres, historical piece by artists such as Bruce Nauman and Yoko Ono will be presented for the first time at 14 Rooms and other rarely seen works by acclaimed artists from around the world will be brought to Basel.
Allora & Calzadilla, Revolving Door, 2011. Presented at 14 Rooms in Basel by Fondation Beyeler, Art Basel, Theater Basel in 2014, MCH Messe Schweiz (Basel) AG.
'14 Rooms' will include Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s 'Revolving Door' (2011), in which a group of dancers spontaneously form a line and begin to rotate around the room in a circular motion, sweeping up visitors as they move around the space.
Santiago Sierra, Veterans of the Wars of Eritrea, Kosovo and Togo Facing the Corner, 2014. Presented at 14 Rooms in Basel by Fondation Beyeler, Art Basel, Theater Basel in 2014, MCH Messe Schweiz (Basel) AG.
In his exploration of social boundaries and socio-cultural inequalities, Santiago Sierra places a succession of war veterans, from varied past conflicts, standing facing one corner of a 5-5-meter room and instructed to only move from their post once solemnly replaced by another veteran mimicking the changing of the guard.
Damien Hirst, Leonard & Raphael Kadid, 2014; Household gloss on wall, chairs and twins; Dimensions variable. Presented at 14 Rooms in Basel by Fondation Beyeler, Art Basel, Theater Basel in 2014. © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2014; MCH Messe Schweiz (Basel) AG.
Damien Hirst’s important early work 'Hans, Georg' (1992), consisting of a rotating cast of identical twins sitting below two of his own identical dot paintings, will be restaged at the show under a new title.
Marina Abramovic虂, Luminosity, 11 Rooms Manchester International Festival. Photo credit courtesy Manchester City Galleries.
Marina Abramovi膰’s 'Luminosity' (1997) places a performer on a bicycle seat fixed onto a wall bathed in bright light, exploring themes of loneliness and spiritual elevation.
Roman Ondák, Swap, 2011. Presented at 14 Rooms in Basel by Fondation Beyeler, Art Basel, Theater Basel in 2014, MCH Messe Schweiz (Basel) AG.
Roman Ondák’s 'Swap' (2011) asks a performer to choose an object as they sit behind a table, and when visitors enter the room they are then able to swap the object with anything else they are willing to exchange, while in Chinese artist Xu Zhen’s 'In Just a Blink of an Eye' (2005) a body floats in mid-air as if frozen, defying both time and gravity, and making the audience question reality and reflect on the work's seeming impossibility.
Artists and the curators will be attending the opening of the exhibition.
While the artists themselves are not present in these works, they instruct performers on how to act out their specifications, resulting in over 70 performers – primarily from the Basel region – taking part in the exhibition. ‘14 Rooms’ will be staged in Hall 3 of Messe Basel in walking distance from Messeplatz. The exhibition will open to the public ahead of Art Basel on Saturday, June 14 and will stay open until Sunday, June 22.
'14 Rooms' is a collaboration between Fondation Beyeler, Art Basel and Theater Basel, and will be accompanied by an education program conceived and run by Fondation Beyeler.
Originally commissioned as ‘11 Rooms’ by Manchester International Festival, the International Arts Festival RUHRTRIENNALE 2012-2014 and Manchester Art Gallery, the project was shown as ‘11 Rooms’ at Manchester International Festival in July 2011, as '12 Rooms' at the International Arts Festival RUHRTRIENNALE 2012-2014 and as '13 Rooms' by Kaldor Public Art Projects at Pier 2/3 in Sydney’s Walsh Bay in April 2013. For each edition, the artists list partially changed.
Ann-Christin Rommen, Marc Bättig are the Producers of the exhibition and Samuel Leuenberger is the Associate Curator.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a book published by Hatje Cantz. The English/German edition will be available to purchase onsite as well as through bookshops.
Further information on ‘14 Rooms’ is available at .
