{"id":125945,"date":"2026-06-18T15:22:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T13:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/?p=125945"},"modified":"2026-07-02T16:55:39","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T14:55:39","slug":"liste-art-fair-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/2026\/06\/18\/liste-art-fair-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Five (+1) from Liste Art Fair 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the evening, after the preview of the 2026 edition of Liste Art Fair<\/a>, people mingle in Basel. Among them are collectors. Of these, most carry a negative impression of the fair. After at least ten thousand steps and who knows how many thousand words echoing in their ears, this is an understandable reaction; “nothing of interest,” they say, “a great deal of confusion, questionable quality this year.” But this reaction usually comes from the less experienced, or the laziest, or perhaps those who as a rule only buy what they personally “like.” Tomorrow they will certainly change their minds, and join the waitlist the way teenagers once queued outside discotheques on the Riviera. Again, this is understandable. But perhaps it should be said at this point: Liste is a difficult fair, one that demands concentration, open-mindedness, humility. Many of the galleries are unfamiliar even to insiders; the artists’ names are not yet established; there are few footholds; the works are unripe and the presentations are rarely museum-grade. Grasping what is at stake requires attention, patience, time. Indeed, of late the sheer quantity of relevant galleries and artists at Liste is, within the context of fairs devoted to emerging art, the highest it could possibly be. And this year the fair has once again proven its willingness to take risks. It does not settle into what is already known, but explores aesthetic, geographic, social and economic territories still uncultivated \u2014 and it is on this basis that we visited it, with the explicit intention of looking more closely even at what, at first glance, does not please.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Najaax Harun,<\/strong> Catinca Tabacaru<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Najaax Harun investigates the relationship between subjectivity and historical rupture, reflecting on traditions, rituals and cultural models. Born in the aftermath of the Somali civil war, she belongs to a generation that did not directly experience the trauma of the conflict but inherited its consequences. Her work is an attempt to give form to what continues to operate beneath the surface, underscoring its contradictions and gaps. In an act of pure emancipation, Harun brings to light latent stories and memories that continue to shape the collective imaginary of her community. Stable categories such as marriage, clan and female roles are reopened to debate. The artist thus becomes both narrator of tradition and mediator between heritage and transformation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Liste\"
Najaax Huran, The pledge, 2026, acrylic on canvas, cm. 140 x 100. Courtesy of Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, Bucharest.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The booth is conceived as an immersive space, inspired by the spatial theories of Herbert Bayer and El Lissitzky, in which pictorial works are juxtaposed with photographs of Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland. Painting and photography correct one another reciprocally: the former prevents the landscape from being read as a neutral backdrop, while the latter spares the painting from the risk of a purely allegorical reading detached from reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this way, Huran’s research enters into dialogue with the program of Catinca Tabacaru, a Romanian gallerist who favors putting post-colonial and post-communist experiences into relation. Although generally considered concluded historical episodes, their structures continue to influence the present. Artist and gallery share an interrupted memory and operate within a common condition of the “post.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ruofan Chen, <\/strong>Shower<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

On the floor of Shower’s booth, residual sawdust from the cutting of wood accumulates, forming precise rectangles matching the dimensions of the premises into which the canvas has been inserted. Accumulation, transition, specularity, particles harmful to workers’ health. Ruofan Chen focuses on what is toxic yet often does not appear as such.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Shower, Liste Art Fair, Installation view. Ph: Jinhyeok Oh.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The structure hangs suspended in mid-air; it offers a surface to shelter beneath; it is uncomfortable yet delicate, chromatically homogeneous, functionally as decomposable as a piece of craftsmanship. From an installation standpoint, it is effective and impeccably executed. If the “structure” is the vehicle through which an ecological theme is brought to attention, this vehicle is perfectly defined, sophisticated, reassuring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ecological dimension is not understood only in environmental terms but also carries a human connotation. Like the raw material, those who work it are subjected to a slow erosion. The repeated act produces a residue that, over the dilated time of labor, settles onto spatial surfaces just as it does within workers’ bodies. The sawdust shavings on the floor are the image of the repetition typical of artisanal activity \u2014 the same repetition to which the artist subjects herself. In this sense the work becomes emblematic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following her recently concluded solo show with LC Queisser in Tbilisi, the work presented at Liste testifies to the same symbiotic bond between the artist and her works; vital energies flow between one and the other, as if the work became the material trace of the perceptions, feelings and narratives that animate her sensibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alexander Basil, <\/strong>Commune<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Commune presents Alexander Basil, an artist of Russian origin who lives and works in Berlin. His works seem to offer privileged access to the private sphere, allowing fears, fantasies and fragilities to surface. Yet this opening is met by an opposite movement. Intimacy is never entirely surrendered to the gaze of others. Bars and grilles interpose themselves between observer and subject, turning vision into a mediated experience; in other canvases, evanescent bodies, transparencies and overlays stratify the image until its legibility becomes uncertain. Within this tension between confession and reticence, the work becomes a meeting place in which artist and viewer continually redefine their respective positions, building a concrete and complex relationship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Liste\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n


<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If, within queer artistic practices, the gaze assumes a central role as the site where desire and recognition are constantly negotiated and redefined, Basil extends this reflection to a broader dimension. In his domestic vignettes the artist scatters a constellation of objects read as fragments of the self.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ordinary elements, apparently inscribed within the neutrality of the everyday, coexist with more explicitly autobiographical references tied to specific moments in his transition. Domestic space thus configures itself as a personal archive in which experiences, memories and transformations sediment into historical presences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through the use of flat fields of color, the artist generates a chromatic continuity between body and environment. Walls, furnishings and objects appear to absorb the same epidermal matter as the subject, as if his interiority had settled into the inhabited space. What results is a mental environment, in which identity is recounted through traces of permanence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Particularly significant within this new body of work is the presence of previously executed paintings, as in a game of mirrors. This self-citational practice heightens the reflexive dimension of the research: past works become further deposits of identity, images that preserve earlier versions of the self and that continue to inhabit the present. Through this stratification, Alexander Basil stages a subjectivity in continuous definition, composed of multiple biographical, affective and visual sedimentations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Katie Shannon,<\/strong> TINA<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

TINA presents a project devoted to the practice of Katie Shannon, exploring the tension between ending and persistence. Gathered under the title End-o, the works pose a question about what continues to exist once the narrative breaks off, the event “runs out,” the structures collapse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Katie Shannon, brickrows [OKR indescript], 2026, brick and steel, cm. 30 x 52.5 x 8. Courtesy of the artist and TINA, London.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Between Glasgow and London, Shannon works at the margins of traditional artistic definitions, moving between nightclubs, independent radio and occasional social spaces. Her works often emerge from collective and temporary contexts. They are hybrid productions in which the boundary between event and object dissolves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although rooted in the performative dimension, Katie Shannon’s practice asserts a strong relationship with material and manual labor. Through slow, laborious processes such as screen-printing, metalworking and sewing, she creates metaphors for a commitment destined to run out. Fatigue, weight and repetition become gestures of resistance that oppose the speed of contemporary production and the rapid consumption of experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Brickrows series, Shannon assembles small cases made from a handmade metal structure that contain and render visible bricks salvaged from housing estates in south London. Originally conceived for the performance Sub Bingo (2024), these works function as stylized, strongly sensorial stage costumes: residual objects that evoke the weight of labor and the dynamics of urban dispossession affecting the city’s peripheries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Katie Shannon’s practice presents itself as an invitation to read time within things, beyond their actual duration. Rather than a nostalgic trace of a past event, Shannon seems interested in the relations that generated it and in what continues to settle after its end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vincent Scheers,<\/strong> Paulina Caspari<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Part of the fascination exerted by electronic components lies in their capacity to render visible what usually remains hidden. Once the casing is removed, the interior of machines appears as a miniature ecosystem. There is, in those components and in the way they aggregate, a precise aesthetic quality: forms, colors and structures not so different, after all, from natural ones. This fascination resurfaces before the works of Vincent Scheers presented at Paulina Caspari’s booth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Vincent Scheers, As we grow (louder), 2026, decommissioned differential amplifier, copper plated Argyranthemum\nfrutescens, copper plated Ribes rubrum, brushed metal, museum plexiglass, cm. 28,7 x 28 x 53,5. Courtesy of the artist and Paulina Caspari, Munich.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

For this series, the Belgian artist uses decommissioned technological devices into which altered organic presences penetrate, as if living matter were silently insinuating itself into the architectures of technics. Objects designed to last are caught in their decay and subjected to the same process of decomposition. Conversely, natural elements coated in copper or crystallized in resin seem to embody the persistence of nature shaped by its countless evolutionary cycles. Within these visual universes, decay does not oppose vitality; the two interact without antagonism. What might appear unsettling instead takes on a surprisingly familiar quality: butterflies seem to have always alighted on copper wires and rusted coils, and dandelions to grow spontaneously in the interstices of a brass gear. In this perceptual slippage, materials expand until they become landscapes, and instruments designed to measure the world end up absorbed into the very natural order they were meant to observe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vincent Scheers creates, within the digital age, analog organisms that recall the posthuman condition theorized by Donna Haraway (A Cyborg Manifesto<\/em>, 1985): a reality in which the artificial, the biological and the human coexist within interdependent systems. Just as his works configure themselves as unstable assemblages, suspended in continuous mutation, so too every attempt at classification or conservation to which they allude seems destined to dissolve within broader processes of the transformation of matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tereza Glazova,<\/strong> sentiment<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Tereza Glazova’s practice is grounded in the subversion of symbolic and material hierarchies. In the works presented by sentiment, the artist deconstructs the monumental, dismantling the untouchable aura of consolidated symbols and forms in order to reduce them to ambiguous fetishes available to new interpretations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Liste\"
Tereza Glazova, Spirit on A Stick, 2026, toy horses, camouflage bandage, wooden table legs, cm. 214 x 91 x 29. Ph. Philipp Rupp. Courtesy of the artist and sentiment, Zurich.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Born in Riga in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet collapse, Glazova grew up in the shadow of seductive Western promises. Today, having settled in Central Europe, she recognizes how difficult it would be to imagine a stable return to the East. The migratory experience generates a form of liminal belonging, suspended between different worlds. In her works, memories of a pre-Soviet heritage coexist with the logics of contemporary consumerism, in a constant identitarian negotiation between place of origin and place of arrival. Objects thus become surfaces of projection onto which images of otherness and dislocation are deposited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Spirit on a Stick<\/em> (2026), Glazova constructs an unstable composition: a rocking horse balanced precariously on a table leg. Riding it, in turn, is the miniature of a real horse, in a play of references and shifts in scale that amplifies the work’s ironic character. Both elements are wrapped in a thin bandage decorated with a military camouflage pattern, a detail that introduces a tension between childhood imagery, monumental rhetoric and conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The artist activates a process of deconstructing the meanings commonly associated with objects. Replacing the monumental horse with a toy means reducing heroic language to a domestic, vulnerable presence, stripping the symbol of its authority and transforming it into a precarious fetish. At the same time, the work suggests that play is not a neutral space but a context in which dynamics of control, violence and identity construction proper to adult life are reflected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This operation also passes through an exhibited materiality. In A Monument to Sunsets<\/em> (2026), the contrasting textures and vivid colors of fabric ribbons capture the eye and assert an eccentric presence. Although composed of waste materials, the work evokes the polished public ceremonies of official inaugurations and commemorative monuments. The ribbon, often associated with the ornamental and the feminine, is transformed into a symbolic, ritual object capable of constructing political identities and shared historical narratives. Tereza Glazova embraces a sensibility in which artifice and imitation do not represent a departure from the real but become critical instruments through which to observe and reread it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the Liste Art Fair in Basel, audiences remain divided \u2014 but the scepticism sparked by novelty is precisely what nourishes the art of tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":125939,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-senza-categoria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125945"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":126109,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125945\/revisions\/126109"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/125939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}