BASEL.- Kunsthalle Basel pushes boundaries once more in 2025, with a program curated by Mohamed Almusibli. Highlights include Switzerland’s largest solo exhibitions to date for Marie Matusz and Ser Serpas, the much-anticipated finale of Valentin Noujaïm’s trilogy La Défense, and Dala Nasser’s Swiss institutional debut. On the European stage, Bagus Pandega and Troy Montes Michie present their first institutional solos. For this year’s back wall project, Kunsthalle Basel partners with London’s project space Galerina to co-curate a new commission by Coumba Samba.
Marie Matusz
January 17–April 27, 2025
Marie Matusz’s practice spans sculptural installations, sound, writing, and film, exploring the intricate relationships between materiality, memory, and narrative. Drawing from various theories, her works evoke a cinematic sensibility—merging stillness and motion to create reflective spaces where past and future converge. By layering materials and choreographing spatial encounters, Matusz invites audiences to experience the fragile interplay of perception, time, and the vulnerability inherent in meaning-making.
Valentin Noujaïm
February 15–May 25, 2025
Valentin Noujaïm’s cinematic work focuses on extinguished life trajectories and reflects on the complexity of power relations within French society. Through his engagement with anti-racist struggles and spatial imaginaries, he sheds light on experiences that have been marginalized by dominant historical and national narratives.
Dala Nasser
May 16–August 10, 2025
Dala Nasser works through abstraction and alternative forms of image-making. Her indexical paintings of land, made through direct contact on location, stand in opposition to the sweeping vistas offered by traditional landscape painting. Considering materials as witnesses, she has developed a growing body of work that foregrounds non-claimed histories, ecologies of slow violence, colonial theft, and infrastructural failure in times and places where human language has been rendered insufficient or out of reach.
Ser Serpas
June 13–September 21, 2025
Ser Serpas is passionate about corporeal and poetic forms of expression, which she explores as both a painter and sculptor. At Kunsthalle Basel, she brings together sculpture, painting, and performance art, with a particular focus on her collaboration with the Margo Korableva Performance Theatre from Tbilisi. Both take existing elements, deconstruct them, and imbue them with new, reimagined meanings. This artistic synergy allows Serpas to reenact selected performances from the theater’s repertoire, creating a dynamic, engaging dialogue between performance art and her sculptures.
Bagus Pandega
August 29–November 16, 2025
At the core of Bagus Pandega’s work lies the disruption of mechanical and industrial systems, opening new perspectives on the relationship between technology and the world around us. His works engage with the economic cycles and ecological consequences facing Indonesia, particularly the exploitation of nature in the name of resources, economic growth, and industrialization. The artist creates modular, organic, multisensory artworks, activated through the interplay of movement, sound, light, plants, and chemical components, which respond directly to their environment. This exhibition will be presented in conjunction with the Swiss Institute, New York.
Coumba Samba
Kunsthalle Basel x Galerina
September 19, 2025–August 23, 2026
Coumba Samba engages with the impacts of institutional structures on both individual and collective identities through her multimedia and performative practice, questioning dominant cultural narratives. Her works address themes such as consumer culture, and the intersections of technology and identity. She expands the gaze to the global web of power and the continuities of colonialism, highlighting how colonial structures and their legacies continue to shape contemporary social and political landscapes.
Troy Montes Michie
October 24, 2025–January 25, 2026
Troy Montes Michie is an interdisciplinary artist whose work intersects collage, identity, and cultural representation, weaving intricate narratives that explore the complexities of race, gender, and power. His practice blends abstraction and figuration to examine themes of Blackness, queerness, and societal visibility, while critically engaging with the tensions between representation and erasure in contemporary culture. By drawing from archives and mass media, Montes Michie exposes the complexity of the gaze and disrupts dominant narratives, offering a nuanced critique of how powerful groups have targeted marginalized communities for oppression.
