Art Basel 2022: Hall 2.0 Booth C8

Dayanita Singh’s practice focusses on the ways viewers engage with photography. Driven by a determination to liberate the image from the wall, Singh has been developing her ‘photo-architectural’ structures for two decades. Underpinned by a lifelong interest in the archive, these teak ‘mobile museums’ enable the artist to choreograph a bodily encounter with her photographs, constructing everchanging spaces for conversation.

Most recently the structures have developed into large wall-mounted panels where the images can be endlessly rearranged. Described by Singh as ‘contact sheets’, the form gained particular importance for the artist while examining her archive of forty years of analogue contact sheets during the Covid-19 lockdowns. This new form of photo-architecture was first realised as the work Let’s See (2021), part of the ongoing touring retrospective exhibition Dancing with my Camera.

For Let’s Talk (2022) Singh has created a contact sheet of chairs, objects that have always been highly evocative for the artist. During a residency at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2002, Singh photographed the collection’s chairs, resulting in an exhibition and limited-edition publication. Here Singh brings together chairs from many different moments and places. Charged with the history of their users, the chairs become portraits, complete with their own personalities and gender, whilst also remaining signs of conversation from the past and future.

Dayanita Singh: Dancing with my Camera is at Gropius Bau, Berlin until 7 August 2022, when it will tour to Villa Stuck Munich, MUDAM Luxemburg, and Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art Porto. Singh is the 2022 recipient of the prestigious Hasselblad Award which will be accompanied by a solo exhibition at the Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg 15 October 2022–20 January 2023.

Polly Apfelbaum developed a new body of ceramic work for her recent exhibition For the Love of Una Hale, at Arcadia University, Pennsylvania. Exploring contemporary ideas surrounding craft, gender and identity, Apfelbaum’s new work melds painting, ceramics and installation.  It examines the formative impact of Pennsylvania German art on Apfelbaum's hybrid sensibility, informed by the artist’s engagement with art history, applied arts and popular culture. ‘The goal is to interpret the personal as political’, says Apfelbaum, citing her long history of working with materials associated with craft and everyday life – such as fabric and rugs. These works have become a means for Apfelbaum to reflect on the inception of her artistic sensibility and its investigation of the materiality of colour. Abstract Quilt of 100 Colors, 2022, shows the influence of both the vernacular art of rural Pennsylvania and modernist abstraction that was key to the post-war cultural life of New York City. 

Polly Apfelbaum’s two-person show with Josef Herzog at Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland runs until 19 June. Her solo exhibition Red Desert, Red Mountain, Red Sea at Magazin III, Jaffa, Israel runs until 15 July.

Callum Innes is known for luminous abstractions that push at the fundamentals of painting: pigment, surface and space. Composed of opaque sections juxtaposed with thin, translucent washes that appear almost permeable, his paintings invoke a dynamic conversation between presence and absence. 

Innes generally works in series, allowing his methods to build upon each other and evolve gradually while he works on several paintings at the same time. Untitled Lamp Black / Alizarin Crimson (2022), appears at first to be only two colours, but a closer look reveals a range of complex hues and shades. Innes started by painting the entire canvas black before applying repeated washes of turpentine to remove paint from part of the surface, leaving all but the faintest vestigial traces of pigment. The remaining black part of the canvas is then painted with another colour, resulting in a luminous, shifting surface that evokes different registers of time.

Alter Ego (Deflowered) is part of an ongoing series of pairs of silver-plated objects, one intact and one flattened. Sometimes, their reflection is a ‘double’, at other times it may be a near relative. Cornelia Parker thinks of them as ‘domestics’, not only in terms of the spaces that they can occupy (hovering over the mantle or tabletop) but also in the sense of power play, where one of the objects has the upper hand. Thoughts of identity crises and class divides abound, as well as ideas of life and death, inhaling and exhaling, conscious and unconscious, reflection and shadow. Sometimes, there’s a sense of a dark psychological undertow, an underlying threat; at other times, just reflected glory. This work’s playful title refers to the fact that the two vases that make up the work are empty and evokes a loss of innocence.

Cornelia Parker currently has a retrospective exhibition at Tate Britain until 16 October.

Central to Banner’s practice has been an exploration of language and communication – its joys, challenges and frustrations. Banner’s Full Stops, a series she begun in 1998, represent the opposite: the space in-between sentences; a literal escape from the verbal language that engulfs us. Banner has returned to this theme over the years, so that these works punctuate her practice itself.

Banner’s Full Stop Seascapes are a series of interventions into found genre paintings, military seascapes acquired from local antique shops. She has erased their original subjects, august galleons, battleships and destroyers, replacing them instead with hand-painted full stops drawn from her personal archive, as a way to assuage her dream of sending them out to sea. She replaces an aggressively masculine subject matter with something esoteric, playful and seductive. The intriguing titles of these works refer to the fonts the full stops are rendered in.

Fiona Banner’s exhibition Pranayama Organ is touring to Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV), Dortmund in September.

Although abstract, many of the artist’s paintings allude to landscape, both the pastoral hills of his native northern Spain and the busy grids of his adopted New York City. The blue foreground of the painting might evoke waves, while the forceful horizon, in bars of black, green and red, could mark a shoreline. The rusty-brown upper section of the painting features a series of cadenced marks typical of the artist: Uslé pushes the pigment slowly across the canvas, with a pace that echoes the homeostatic rhythms of the body, such as our heartbeat or our breath.