BASEL.- Ghosts seem to be everywhere. Visual culture teems with specters, from Hollywood blockbusters like Ghostbusters (1984) to indie films such as All of Us Strangers (2023). They haunt screens, theater stages, and pages: literature, folklore, and myth are saturated with spirits that refuse to leave us in peace.

They have also always haunted art. As entities of the in-between, ghosts are mediators between worlds, between above and below, life and death, horror and humor, good and evil, Visible and invisible. Any attempt to depict, record, or communicate with them thus offers a conceptual challenge and an emotional thrill.

This fall and winter, the Kunstmuseum Basel dedicates an extensiVe exhibition to these unfathomable entities. With over 160 works and objects created during the past 250 years, Ghosts. Visualizing the Supernatural explores the rich visual culture associated with ghosts that took shape in the Western hemisphere in the nineteenth century—when science, spiritualism, and popular media began to intersect in new ways, inspiring art and artists eVer since.

Today, the nineteenth century is mostly regarded as a golden age of rationality, science, and technology but it was also a high season for the belief in ghosts and apparitions. In the second half of the century, ghosts became a tool for probing the emerging contours of the psyche and helped open new paths into people’s inner lives. The Romantic era produced an appetite for spectacles and marvels, and a belief in spirits was flanked by innovations in technology, including in the technologies of illusion (such as the theatrical technique, Pepper’s Ghost).

The invention of photography around 1830 had led to the rise of spirit photography with important proponents such as William H. Mumler in the United States and, later, William Hope in England; their photographs, which seemed to make loved ones reappear, held the promise of a life after death and became a notable influence on what we imagine ghosts to look like, even today. Munich “ghost baron” Albert Von Schrenck-Notzing— arguably the most famous parapsychologist—combined the novel technical means of photography with a quasi-scientific approach and intended to document the supernatural apparitions produced in his mediumistic seances. (His seances were attended and witnessed, on several occasions, by none other than the writer Thomas Mann).

While spirit photography is thus a central theme of the show, the writings and pictures created by spiritualist mediums to record their direct contact with the world of ghosts offer a variation on the broader theme of communication. Given the close connection of ghosts and states of psychological distress, the exhibition also takes a close interest in hauntings, when ghosts inhabit spaces. It follows these trails and developments as they originated in Western culture in the nineteenth century and stays largely focused on artists who drew inspiration from the resulting diverse visual traces and ghostly narratives. In doing so, it gleefully branches out into bodies of images beyond fine art, whose influence on artists in the twentieth century is demonstrated in the second half of the exhibition.

The exhibition and accompanying magazine-style publication were prepared in close consultation with two expert advisors—Andreas Fischer of the Freiburg IGPP (Institute for frontier areas of psychology and mental health), a leading authority on spirit photography and materialization phenomena, and British art historian Susan Owens, author of The Ghost: A Cultural History (2017), who has aptly called ghosts “humanity’s shadows”. The project traces this human element, therefore excluding angels, nature spirits, demons, and the like. Instead, it turns a spotlight on the theme’s poetic potential, its power to inspire, and the function of ghosts as a metaphor sustaining critical responses to the contemporary world, often addressing things that cannot be repressed.

The fact that such manifestations interact continually with our collective imagination— our cultural unconscious, even—is what makes the ghost such a powerful and enduring figure and the exhibition a surprising, fun, and thought-provoking journey. The scenography, intended to help open the senses to atmospheric changes and liminal experiences, was conceived by Alicja Jelen and Clemens Müller of please don’t touch (Dortmund).

In the accompanying magazine-style publication, there are texts by external authors, including the two advisors to the exhibition, Andreas Fischer and Susan Owens. There are further contributions by British Assyriologist Irving Finkel, author of The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies (2019); American poet Emily Dickinson; German writer Thomas Mann, with his vivid description of attending a seance; contemporary Swiss author Ariane Koch, whose text offers a “ghost song” issued from a ghostwriting session; artists’ statements by Corinne May Botz, Claudia Casarino, Adam Fuss, Tony Oursler, and Cornelia Parker; and some fact-checking provided by the Instagram star, Timur.

Illustrations come from the War and Peas-duo, Elizabeth Pich and Jonathan Kunz, whose webcomics show their longstanding interest in everything ghost-related.

Edited by Eva Reifert. Published by Christoph Merian Verlag, 2025.