Not every artist is obliged to resist or reflect the world around them. And yet, wandering through Art Basel and its constellation of satellite fairs, exhibitions, and events, I can’t help but wonder: What world are these artists speaking to — or from? Perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect a context so deeply entangled with commerce to consistently foreground artistic integrity, let alone reckon with the multiple crises unfolding around us. Still, moments of political urgency do emerge — rarely at the center, but rather at the periphery, in the interstitial spaces carved out by platforms like Liste (now in its thirtieth year), June Art Fair, and the Basel Social Club. Even so, the density of bodies, the obsession with novelty, and the fair’s unyielding tempo often conspire to erode attention, making it difficult to engage the work on its own terms.
In The Complete Curator (2015), Liam Gillick critiques the transformation of art schools from spaces of open debate into systems increasingly aligned with commercial and institutional interests. He casts the art fair as a site where contingency, ambiguity, and experimentation give way to polished legibility and economic utility.1 This framework offers a useful lens to consider how emerging artists — especially those exhibiting at Art Basel and its many satellite fairs — navigate the tensions between critical practice and market imperatives. Yet, other factors come into play as well.
To be clear, this piece does not claim a definitive stance. Rather, it reflects on how artists contend with the pressures to engage overtly with politics — or more precisely, how the use of materials might carry politics, obliquely or explicitly, depending on the viewer’s willingness to read them as such. Having worked in and around Art Basel for over a decade — as an artist, performer, assistant, press writer, critic, and tour guide for curators and the so-called “general public” — I have witnessed how the fair compresses complex artworks into spectacle, often reducing nuanced ideas into simplified narratives. This dynamic provokes urgent questions: How can artists maintain political or critical engagement in a space saturated with commercial expectations? Is resistance still possible — or has it already been fully aestheticized?
There are well-established precedents to consider. Andrea Fraser’s 2005 essay “A museum is not a business. It is run in a businesslike fashion” remains sharply relevant. “We can no longer just retreat into critique of the institution — because we are the institution,” she writes, underscoring the complicity artists and curators face within the very systems they seek to interrogate.2 Hito Steyerl deepens this critique in her 2017 essay “Duty Free Art,” describing the art world as “a mirror world of high finance: opaque, networked, and fundamentally unaccountable.”3 Her analysis is a reminder that fairs are far from neutral spaces; they are embedded in broader systems of inequality, speculation, and control.
While institutional critique is still crucial, the space for it — especially from the artist’s standpoint — seems to have constricted. During a recent studio visit, one artist preparing for a fair confided that had their gallery fully understood the political stakes of the work, it might not have reached the booth. This tension between message and market was pervasive. Larger galleries generally favored superficial themes of beauty and subjectivity — terms repeated so often they lost meaning. Some artists responded with irony, cynicism, or oblique references to global crises, while others embedded complex political meanings into form and material. Many sidestepped direct declarations altogether, offering layered reflections of a world — and a market — in apparent free fall.
Ndayé Kouagou’s installation at Nir Altman (Munich), part of the Statements section at Art Basel, exemplified this approach. A Not That Dirty Mirror (2025) centered on a large wall text — “WHERE SHOULD WE GO FROM HERE?” — flanked by satellite dishes and a looped video. The video features a journalist conducting exaggerated interviews reminiscent of Ryan Trecartin’s editorial methods, with hyper-saturated graphics repeatedly referencing a vague but ongoing crisis. The word “CRISIS” appears in bold caps at intervals, echoing the ambient anxiety across the fair. While Kouagou’s work alluded to political disengagement or disorientation, it still managed to surface critical questions — if only through absence or avoidance.
Rhea Dillon’s work actively invites political interpretation through material and historical density. Born in London in 1996, Dillon received the Baloise Art Prize for her “Leaning Figures” series (2025) at Art Basel’s Statements, presented by Soft Opening (London). Her sculptural language draws from colonial histories, minimalist abstraction, and Black feminist theory to explore the shaping of Caribbean and British identities. The installation reconfigures the domestic dinnerware cabinet and museological vitrine — both boat and casket, vessel, and container. Wall-mounted boxes of glass and mahogany enclose resin-cast crystal plates tinted with molasses or Jamaican soil. These sculptural assemblages quietly imply Black bodies at rest, resisting both erasure and display.
Across fairs and exhibitions during these few days, questions of visibility, repression, and the aesthetics of data accumulation emerged repeatedly. Many artists seemed less concerned with asserting ideological positions than with gesturing toward them — through implication, transference, layering, and refusal. In this climate, the political becomes less about message than method: how one works within and against the constraints of spectacle and censorship; how meaning resists legibility; and how form itself can become a site of resistance. I was reminded of Jacques Rancière’s insight that “politics is the experience of the distribution of the sensible as a process of dissensus and its effects in the reconfiguration of what is visible, sayable and audible.”4
At Liste, overlapping strategies and tensions surfaced across presentations, revealing how artists respond to structures of visibility, identity, and control. At New York-based gallery King’s Leap, Nandi Loaf exhibited a triad of interwoven works scrutinizing the figure of the artist as a constructed persona. For Loaf, the commercial artist is not an inherent identity but a performative role shaped by economic imperatives and institutional demands. Her project turns inward, using her own biography and career as raw material — gathering, systematizing, and recontextualizing personal data. In doing so, Loaf exposes the feedback loop between selfhood and market logic, reclaiming authorship over the forces that seek to define her. The result is a self-critical practice where the artist’s body and metadata become both subject and surface. I witnessed gallerists pick up the materials on several occasions, showing them to visitors like evidence, often revealing a seemingly hidden work in the space.
At 243 Luz (Margate), also at Liste, Solomon Garçon continued his visceral exploration of voyeurism, control, and the aesthetics of desire. His new series of paintings, dubbed “Bobby” (2025), merges materials such as faux leather, plastic, suede, and lipstick with the lingering olfactory imprint of Calvin Klein’s Obsession — a scent loaded with cultural memory. Several canvases are embedded with active recording devices, transforming the booth into a site of continuous surveillance. I witnessed the gallerists revealing these devices by taking the paintings off the wall to show visitors. The tension between surface and scrutiny extended into Untitled (room) (2025), a two-meter sculpture clad in pegboard and tinted acetate, containing high heels sealed in plastic sandwich bags — fetishized objects both hidden and displayed. While Loaf internalizes and critiques mechanisms of artistic value, Garçon externalizes systems of control, amplifying the eerie convergence of pleasure, power, and performance. Together, their works trace how identity — crafted, consumed, or surveilled — takes shape within and against contemporary art’s unstated conventions.
For its debut at Liste, Commune (Vienna) presented a solo exhibition by Belarusian artist Gleb Amankulov, featuring the photographic series “Lasso” (2025) alongside a set of sculptural assemblages created on site. Amankulov, who lives and works in Vienna, investigates the political and legal structures shaping contemporary Belarus, with a practice rooted in the material economies of art and dynamics of power. His work considers “searching” both as a legal act and as a tool of control. Central to the presentation, “Lasso” consists of images sourced over several years from Telegram channels affiliated with the Belarusian state security services. These photographs document the aftermath of police raids on private homes and have been digitally altered by Amankulov: he removes visible damage caused by the searches, isolating untouched fragments within a white void. This visual subtraction draws attention to what has been taken, erased, or violently obscured — a metaphor mirrored in his sculptural process, where gathering everyday objects becomes a reflection on authority, surveillance, and absence. For Amankulov, data is not neutral; it is raw material shaped by systems of control and used to question them.
Back at Art Basel, at Mother’s Tankstation (Dublin, London), Yuri Pattison’s entropy study (background aeromancy) (2025) was one of three sculptures actively monitoring ambient radiation levels in real time. Constructed from 80/20 Ready Tube aluminum extrusion, a RadiationD-v1.1 (CAJOE) Geiger counter kit, a found scale model of an unrealized Chinese high-rise apartment building sourced from a marketing suite on Xianyu, along with LED lights, a microcontroller, and a Raspberry Pi 5 running generative shader software, the work blurs the line between speculative architecture and environmental sensor. Radiation detected in the surrounding space activates and illuminates the model’s windows, which appear alternately as a glowing skyscraper or an electric votive candle. Measuring 137 × 42 × 42 cm, the piece merges relational gestures with infrastructural critique. Encounters activated by the gathering or divulging of data kept recurring across the fair.
What lingers across these contexts isn’t a grand ideological gesture but a quieter, more tactical form of dissent. Artists (not necessarily the ones mentioned above) increasingly work within, rather than against, the machinery of visibility — embedding critique in form, gesture, or refusal. This is not resistance in the traditional sense, but a negotiation shaped by market pressures, institutional expectations, and the aesthetics of legibility.
Still, another piece remains to be written — one that asks why so many artists choose opacity over clarity. Is it self-censorship, exhaustion, or strategy? In many ways, artists are becoming anonymous — mirroring the invisible labor and anonymous capital that sustain a system fundamentally at odds with the conditions of production. To be clear, I’m talking about class, about complicity, about etiquette, about unstated conventions, about the lack of genuine diversity; about how inequality is aestheticized, instrumentalized, or quietly sidelined in favor of market fluency.
