Abstract
- Award-winning director and artist Steve McQueen has opened Bass (2024) at Schaulager Basel, which is now on view by means of November 16.
- Initially introduced at Dia Beacon, the piece expands on McQueen’s well-known cinematic oeuvre, utilizing gentle and sound to create an immersive sensory area.
When Steve McQueen unveiled Bass final 12 months, various had been thrown for a loop – not like Deadpan (1997) which earned him a Turner Prizer or his Academy Award-winning 12 Years a Slave (2013), this work was image-less altogether. Quite, the artist opted for one thing extra pared down, utilizing solely gentle and sound, cinema’s constructing blocks.
McQueen brings Bass to Schaulager Basel, marking his return to the Swiss establishment twelve years after his landmark eponymous exhibition. Initially co-commissioned by the Laurenz Basis, Schaulager Basel and Dia Artwork Basis, the work debuted at Dia Beacon final 12 months, the place it remodeled the museum’s cavernous, post-industrial underground into an enveloping sensory area. The piece has since been tailored to enrich Schaulager’s personal architectural character, flooding the house with a 40-minute, immersive presentation of low-frequency tones and spears of shifting hues.
“What I really like about gentle and sound is that they’re each created by means of motion and fluidity.” McQueen wrote in a current assertion. “They are often molded into any form, like vapor or a scent; they will sneak into any nook and cranny.”
In-hand with this exploration of sunshine – beautiful in its luminosity and imperceptible ebbs and flows – the piece additionally wrestles with acquainted questions for McQueen: these of id, absence and the trauma of the Black diaspora. By means of the temporal-sensorial limbo that’s Bass, the artist hones in on the “starting factors” of the “all-encompassing” – psychological states, layered historical past, private reminiscence and the invisible forces that transfer us.
Right here, McQueen not solely expands our limits of notion, however what we all know his canon to be. In doing so, Bass additional enhances and elaborates on his decades-long interrogation of the shifting picture, opening up new dimensions to his cinematic universe.
The piece is now on view in Basel by means of November 16.
Schaulager Basel
Ruchfeldstrasse 19,
4142 Münchenstein,
Switzerland
