Nick Mauss, “Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc.”. Installation view at Kunsthalle Basel, 2020. Photography by Philipp Hänger. Courtesy of Kunsthalle Basel.
Nick Mauss, “Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc.”. Installation view at Kunsthalle Basel, 2020. Konrad Klapheck, Liberté, amour, art, 1964; Georgia Sagri, Open Wound, 2018; Georgia Sagri, Fresh Bruise. Photography by Philipp Hänger. Courtesy of Kunsthalle Basel.
Nick Mauss, “Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc.”. Installation view at Kunsthalle Basel, 2020. Georgia Sagri, Deep Cut, 2018, and Ketty La Rocca, Comma with 3 dots, 1970. Photography by Philipp Hänger. Courtesy of Kunsthalle Basel.
Nick Mauss, “Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc.”. Installation view at Kunsthalle Basel, 2020. Photography by Philipp Hänger. Courtesy of Kunsthalle Basel.
Nick Mauss, “Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc.”. Installation view at Kunsthalle Basel, 2020. Rosemary Mayer, Galla Placidia, 1973. Photography by Philipp Hänger. Courtesy of Kunsthalle Basel.
Nick Mauss, “Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc.”. Installation view at Kunsthalle Basel, 2020. Edward Owens, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, 1968–70. Photography by Philipp Hänger. Courtesy of Kunsthalle Basel.
Nick Mauss, “Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc.”. Installation view at Kunsthalle Basel, 2020. Video documentation of Ray Johnson’s artist book Ray Gives a Party, ca. 1955. Photography by Philipp Hänger. Courtesy of Kunsthalle Basel.
Nick Mauss, “Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc.”. Installation view at Kunsthalle Basel, 2020. Gretchen Bender, TV Text and Image (PEOPLE WITH AIDS), 1986–1993. Photography by Philipp Hänger. Courtesy of Kunsthalle Basel.
Nick Mauss, “Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc.”. Installation view at Kunsthalle Basel, 2020. Rosemary Mayer, Galla Placidia, 1973. Hannah Höch, Ich bin ein armes Tier, 1959. Photography by Philipp Hänger. Courtesy of Kunsthalle Basel.
Nick Mauss, “Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc.”. Installation view at Kunsthalle Basel, 2020. Konrad Klapheck, Liberté, amour, art, 1964. Photography by Philipp Hänger. Courtesy of Kunsthalle Basel.
This show, conceived by Nick Mauss, opens — coherently — upon a threshold. A succession of flats commences, the first being a video that documents a Ray Johnson artist book. This is followed by Mauss’s freestanding screen Transcript (2020) and Bea Schlingelhoff’s typeface dedicated to Swiss activist Anne-Marie Piguet. This entryway paratextually anticipates the blossoming of Rosemary Mayer’s vaporous textile volumes, vestiges of feminine political hegemonies balanced against the typographical rigor of Ketty La Rocca. Mayer’s titles, Galla Placidia and Hypsipyle, introduce a subtle byzantine allure that gradually insinuates itself throughout the show, including a disciplined conceptual labyrinth vividly manifested in the final room. Here, the environmental conundrum of Mauss’s Thresholds rearticulate the space into an imaginary unfolding of rooms. The space is inhabited by, among the other presences, Mayers’s fluctuant “visitations,” Anton Perich’s filmic relic of Victor Hugo Rojas’s iconoclast performance, and a shielded flânerie by Ken Okiishi. In the precisely orchestrated mise-en-scène some symbolic dispersion is planned and prepared. It crystallizes in Edward Owens filmic encrustations that scale his mother’s portrait; in Georgia Sagri’s bleeding open wounds that rip open institutional limbo; in seventeenth-century “bizarre silks” that transport rootless decorations inflicted in their weft; and is reversed in Megan Francis Sullivan’s pictorial quotes. Robert Morris’s atomic linen, a textile dystopia, contributes to a “what remains” post-historical system in which elements gravitate and invisible forces allow the works to fully exist.
