In a Good Shape

“In a Good Shape” questions – through art installations, objects, canvas prints, and sound performances – the strategies of destruction present in artistic practices, as a symptom of extended phenomena characteristic of the contemporary economy of images.

Following the normalization of new media, the dematerialization of supports transformed the possible approaches to the matter, generating an uncontrolled spreading of images and deeply altering the relations between persistence of forms and oblivion. If, on the one hand, digital reproduction makes it possible to convert every image into information that is freely multipliable and storable, promising retinal immortality, on the other hand, all data tends to drift at the margins of the increasing flow of available information. This new intensity in image economy conceals, but doesn’t remove, the process of disintegration, which is immanent to matter and confers to every object its value of vanitas.

The artists invited to “In a Good Shape” operate in the wake of the big acts of artistic destruction that characterized the second half of the 20th century – a period during which the number of artworks blown up, cut into pieces, shot, or incinerated is uncountable. Facing the heroic and monumental processes developed by many of their predecessors, Brigham Baker, Martin Chramosta, David Hanes and Sonia Kacem draw on microscopic and underground forces, where the social, biological and physical fields criss-cross and merge. The strategies developed by these artists aim to sabotage the interfaces that generally mediate the artistic process, which are then brought back into a generalized collapse of forms. Consequently, a ghost-like imagery emerges, where ruin, trace, and the viral spreading of fragments and dust prevail.

additional opening hours during Art Basel: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 3pm – 6pm