Five Exhibitions That Made an Accidental Day Trip Unforgettable

My friend Marianne knew exactly what she was doing when she invited me to join her and curator Elsa Himmer at Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger. Walking through "Irène Zurkinden: Love, Life" with Elsa felt like being let in on one of art history's best kept secrets. This retrospective covers nearly sixty years of work from the late 1920s onward, and I had never heard of Zurkinden until this exhibition, which makes her absence from broader European modernist circles more surprising!

Her portraits are what grabbed me first. Tight frames that create immediate intimacy with her subjects. But when I learned these were portraits of Meret Oppenheim, and that the two artists had shared an apartment in Paris while commuting between Basel and Paris throughout the 1930s, the entire body of work shifted for me. This was documentation of a creative partnership that sustained both artists through what must have been incredibly challenging times for women in predominantly male artistic circles.

Left to right: Meret Oppenheimer, 1929. Oil on canvas, 65.2 x 50 cm.
Meret en bleu, no XXXVI, 1930. Oil on canvas, 73 x 60cm.
Meret à l’orange, 1932-35. Oil on canvas, 65 x 54.5.

The pieces where Zurkinden etched directly into wet oil paint are what I keep thinking about. There's something enticing about an artist willing to risk scratching a painted surface for a more complex visual conversation. These works from the early 1930s show someone who understood that sometimes you have to break something to make it more alive. The technique reminded me of those black scratch off sheets from childhood (the ones where you’d scrape away the dark surface to reveal bright colour lines underneath). There’s that same sense of discovery, of finding something hidden beneath.

Left to right: Detail of Mes souliers, 1971. Oil on canvas, 82 x 107 cm.
Histoire d’une nuit (un rêve), 1935. Oil on canvas, 54 x 73 cm.

Her interpretation of Böcklin's Island of the Dead particularly stuck with me. Where Böcklin loaded his version with heavy Romantic death symbolism, Zurkinden's approach feels lighter, more concerned with formal relationships than mystical atmosphere. It suggests how women artists of her generation approached inherited art historical themes while completely refusing their emotional register.

Böcklinade, 1958. Oil on canvas, 65 x 110 cm. (interpretation of Böcklin’s Island of the Dead)

Ser Serpas's "Of my life" at Kunsthalle Basel had a deceptively simple premise: placing two canvases together while paint remains wet to create doubled images that function as visual metaphors for how memory actually operates. The results are never identical to their source, always carrying traces of transformation and slightly off in ways that feel more honest than perfect.

Installation View, Ser Serpa’s, Of my life, Kunsthalle Basel, 2025.

The five-room installation creates this unsettling sense of déjà vu through architectural symmetry, with similar rooms bookending the experience. Between the painting spaces, installations incorporate these slow, hypnotic gestures from historical stagings by the Margo Korableva Performance Theatre in Tbilisi. The movements are stripped of narrative context that somehow feel both ancient and completely contemporary. What I find compelling about Serpas's approach is how she treats the instability of representation not as a technical failure but as the fundamental condition of how images actually work in our minds. In an era when we're drowning in digital image circulation, her analog investigation into how pictures lose and gain meaning through physical transfer feels both nostalgic and oddly prescient.

David Chikhladeze, Kitchen Drama, 1993.
Kitchen Drama, 1993/2025. Performance by Nini Kobaladze, la Re, and David Chikhladze.

Vittorio Brodmann's "Simulations" at Galerie Gregor Staiger in Zurich is exactly the kind of work that makes me think differently about what painting can do right now. The gallery describes it as "thinking aloud" through visual means, which sounds like art-speak until you actually stand in front of these paintings and realise that's exactly what's happening. Brodmann moves fluidly between abstraction and representation, creating works that feel like they're constantly negotiating with themselves about what they want to become. The approach reminded me of how Stefanie Heinze works on her large scale paintings, the same sense of improvisation and discovery happening in real time from paper to canvas. Titles like "Pollution" and "Temporary Structure" suggest meaning without ever delivering it cleanly, and I find that interpretive stance incredibly refreshing.

Left to right: Primordial Slop, 2025. Oil on canvas, 180 x 135 cm.
Temporary Structure, 2025. Oil on canvas, 190 x 150 cm.

In a cultural moment obsessed with immediate comprehension and hot takes, Brodmann's paintings demand something we're losing: the willingness to sit with uncertainty. They insist on slowness, on the value of not immediately knowing what you're looking at. From a curatorial perspective, this kind of work creates the conditions for genuine discovery rather than confirmation of what you already think you know.

Left to right: Envy, 2025. Oil on canvas, 55 x 50 cm.
Untitled, 2025. Pencil on paper, 21 x 29.7 cm.

Bagus Pandega's "Sumber Alam" back at Kunsthalle Basel was one of those pieces that completely reframes how you think about control and agency. The installation puts plants in charge of industrial machinery through biofeedback. The natural rhythms literally dictate mechanical processes in a complete reversal of typical extraction relationships. What impressed me wasn't just the conceptual elegance but how the work makes these usually abstract relationships between technology and ecology physically tangible. As visitors, we become part of the feedback loop, thus our movement affects the system's operation. It's the kind of piece that stays with you long after you've left the gallery, changing how you notice systems of control in everyday life.

Bagus Pandega, Sumber Alam installation view and close-up of the biofeedback system in action

A completely accidental detour crossing the border into Germany turned out to be the day's biggest surprise. Seeing 1960s "space age" furniture at Vitra Schaudepot, next to contemporary metaverse designs, creates this temporal conversation that's both humbling and hilarious. What once seemed radically futuristic now looks charmingly period specific.

Contemporary metaverse designs next to 1960s “space age” furniture at Vitra Schaudepot.

I loved the section displaying the literary origins of sci-fi design. Seeing first editions of Jules Verne’s Around the Moon, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds reminded me that our design futures have always been shaped by speculative fiction. These worn volumes that once seemed wildly imaginative now anchor an entire aesthetic movement.

Jules Verne’s Around the Moon, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds.

The curatorial insight is spot-on with how design functions as cultural criticism, with each object embodying assumptions about how technological development should shape human experience. Argentine designer Andrés Reisinger's installation treats these historical artifacts as ongoing conversations rather than museum relics, which feels like exactly the right approach. What struck me most was how this exhibition made our current digital speculation seem equally likely to look dated from future perspectives. It's a reminder that every generation thinks it's finally figured out what the future will look like, and every generation is wonderfully, predictably wrong.