Art Basel in Paris: Conversations 2024

Art Basel in Paris Conversations Programme is being held for the first time at the Petit Palais, opposite the Grand Palais, curated for the third year by Paris-based curators Pierre Alexandre Matéos and Charles Teyssou. The programme features eleven panel discussions in English and French, along with performances by Aho Ssan and Christian Falsnaes, bringing together key figures from the art world and beyond. Themes include the evolving gallery and museum landscape, emerging trends in non-Western and digital art, and Paris as a centre of Queer culture.

Highlights include a Premiere Artist Talk with Nil Yalter, the Turkish-born French artist and recipient of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2024 Venice Biennale; a discussion on the narrowing gap between large commercial galleries and public institutions, as galleries recruit institutional figures for research and exhibition programmes; and how Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (1873) shaped Modernism, with themes like ‘The Grotesque, the Bad, and the Ugly’—a nod to Sergio Leone’s 1966 spaghetti Western—sparking an artistic revolution. Paris will also be explored as a hub of the homosexual artistic avant-garde, referencing figures such as Natalie Clifford Barney, Claude Cahun, Christian Bérard, and Jean Cocteau.

Other topics will examine the relationship between artistic transgression and institutional frameworks, the vibrant art scene of Dakar, hip-hop, graffiti, and dub poetry as forms of artistic resistance, and the life and work of French writer and activist Jean Genet.

Art Basel Conversations runs from Thursday, October 17, to Saturday, October 19, at the Petit Palais. See the full programme here.