BASEL.- In December 2025, physicists at Hiroshima University proposed that in the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang, two species of cosmic string wound around one another and locked into stable topological knots. These structures briefly dominated the energy budget of the newborn universe before decaying to produce the matter-antimatter asymmetry from which all baryonic matter emerged. Before atoms, before forces, before form: topology. Identity is secondary. The knot comes first.

This is the philosophical premise of Cosmic Knots. The exhibition makes a second, institutional argument: what if the same principle applied to art? Some art operates structurally like the cosmic knot. It precedes its own documentation and complicates the apparatus of measurement, visibility, and reproducibility through which contemporary culture converts experience into exchange value. It does not circulate cleanly as image, metric, or commodity data.

Presented in the concrete silos of a former industrial complex, the exhibition brings together three large-scale immersive installations alongside live performance. Kurt Hentschläger's SUB immerses visitors in absolute darkness punctured by stroboscopic light, where the retina becomes the only medium and the work withholds itself from documentation. Mariko Mori's Tom Na H-iu (2006), a five-meter glass sculpture networked in real time to the Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory in Japan, responds to cosmic events with colour-coded light: the form is stable, but its content is produced by events beyond prediction or control. X — Kinetic Techno Sculpture, by Gábor Kitzinger, András László Nagy, and Rozi Mákó, is a multisensory environment where participants' live biometric data generates a constantly evolving audiovisual field, channeling the communal energy of the rave into a meditative space.

The opening performance evening at Trafohalle, Bottmingen, activates an undiscovered brutalist heritage. Grotesque Gymnastics opens with vertical dance; Mári Mákó follows with a sound sculpture activation; Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai) performs HYBR:ID PARA PARA, drawing on astrophysics and Minkowski's four-dimensional spacetime; and Dork (Dorka Berkes) closes into the after-party. The performance will not be livestreamed or comprehensively documented. The decision not to circulate it as content is itself a curatorial position.

What connects the works is structural: each organizes experience around forces that precede and exceed the visible, positioning the sensing body not as recipient but as constitutive element. Their primary content is the encounter, and the encounter does not travel. This is a structural argument about what art can be when it is not designed first for circulation, documentation, or data extraction. What remains is experience, presence, and the brief entanglement between body and invisible force: topology, not image.

0xCollection, founded in 2023 by Karel Komárek, is a Basel-based institution working with digital and time-based media art across exhibition, research, and education. Its annual curatorial framework, led by Director of Curatorial Affairs Viola Lukács, moves through thematic cycles — Synesthetic Immersion, Frames of Reference, and now the structural inquiry of Cosmic Knots. The exhibition is accompanied by HEXA, a new publication co-edited with Charlotte Kent, exploring sustainable models for institutions working with emerging media, collection, and conservation. Cosmic Knots is presented in collaboration with OMG, Franck! Festival in the frame of Art Basel 2026, with the support of Allwyn.