Curator at Art Basel Unlimited explains how the exhibition came about

• Giovanni Carmine has been curator of Art Basel’s Unlimited show for four years.
• Carmine told BI that selecting the art, building a venue and installing it for the final show took a year.
• This article is part of BIs 2024 Art Basel seriesthat takes you to the global stage of the art fair.

Giovanni Carmine uses words like “dialogue” and “conversation” to describe the relationship between artworks in Unlimited, an exhibition during the annual Art Basel show in Switzerland.

Carmine, the director of Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, told Business Insider that his goal as an exhibition curator is to find a way to make pieces with vastly different subjects flow together and communicate with each other.

While some pieces, like Lutz Bacher’s “Chess,” have a literal sound, others, like David Claerbout’s “Birdcage,” deliberately omit noise. Regardless of the sound a piece leaves out, Carmine hopes it will spark a discussion among observers.

“The people who come here will have – perhaps for the first time – an experience they will never forget,” Carmine said. “This is the proposal that art makes: let’s discuss things together, let’s figure it out, and let’s also challenge ourselves.”

For Carmine, creating a space to welcome those conversations doesn’t start weeks or months before the show. Managing a space like Unlimited takes a year.

Curating this year’s Unlimited show began last year at Art Basel

Every summer, the Swiss city of Basel attracts an influx of visitors for a week. Gallerists, museum curators, artists and art-curious tourists arrive for the Art Basel show.

The event lasts a week and is divided into a handful of sectors. Art installations spread throughout the public spaces form the Parcours program. In one large room, more than 250 galleries display art from all over the world. Films are shown and experts organize discussions, question and answer sessions and debates.

Perhaps the most popular part of Art Basel is the Unlimited sector, famous for its large-scale works. The exhibition has no theme, but Carmine describes it as “an overview of contemporary art and what’s interesting in the market right now.”

In a hall the size of three football fields, artists can create and present work without physical barriers.

This year, 70 projects were on display in the 172,000-square-foot space. The works include immense installations, seemingly endless paintings, captivating live performances, extensive photo series and striking video projections.

For example, Chiharu Shiota’s “The Extended Line” takes up about 1,500 square feet of the hall. Miles of red rope hang above a bronze cast of the artist’s open hands and arms, urging viewers to question what it means to be human. In another part of the room, 1,200 of the world’s most popular names stretch across a wall in a project titled “The World: A Moment in Time” by Allan McCollum.

Carmine said the placement of each piece is intentional. But before he can decide where a work of art will find its home in the hall, Carmine must select what will be on display – something that starts a year in advance.

“The moment we open the show is the moment we start working for the next year,” he said.

This is Carmine’s fourth year as curator of Unlimited. He spends the week of Art Basel talking to gallery representatives, discussing artists’ works and planting seeds for the next exhibition.

Once Art Basel is over, Carmine says these conversations will become more serious. Instead of an individual artist submitting a project, the artwork is exhibited with the support of a gallery.

Carmine’s next step is visiting galleries to view artwork and artists. He could go to another Art Basel show in Paris or Miami and continue exploring potential works.

A committee then works together to select the projects at the end of January. Like most years, a selection of old and new work was chosen this year.

Carmine is given the blank canvas of a huge white hall, and over the next two months he will work with an architect to design the space. Walls will have to be built and rooms created to house each project.

Carmine estimates there were about 50 iterations of the hall this year. Every year comes with hurdles, and this year Carmine was tasked with developing a space for unusually long pieces.

“I knew it would be a challenge to have very long paintings to show them in a way that was primarily good for the paintings and for the visitors to see them,” he said.

Carmine said the team used diagonals. Two long walls divide the room. Keith Haring’s “Untitled (FDR NY) #5-22” stretches one wall, and Sam Falls’ “Spring to Fall” fills another.

“The placement also allows you to generate a kind of dramaturgy,” Carmine said.

For example, Carmine said the idea was for Mario Ceroli’s “Progetto per la Pace” to be the first piece visitors see. The mixed-media work, consisting of 365 white silk flags in dirt and hay, represents a vision of peace.

“At these moments in human history, I think it is interesting to place an exclamation on this subject at the beginning of the exhibition,” he said.

Once the layout of the hall is finalized, the walls and lamps are built and installed. Finally, the galleries and artists arrive about four days before Art Basel starts to install their projects.

Carmine watches as the bright white room changes. During the installation, he estimates he will walk about 30 miles a day while overseeing the process.

Then comes Carmine’s favorite part: welcoming an audience.

‘A small art town’

Over the next week, viewers will wander through what Carmine calls “a little art town.” The projects evoke a wide range of emotions.

Kresiah Mukwazhi challenges the cultural norms and taboos placed on girls and women in her 7-meter-long work, “Nyenyedzi nomwe (The Seven Sisters Pleiades).” In the piece, she uses more than 1,000 pieces of salvaged bra straps and lingerie fabric from sex workers in Harare, Zimbabwe, to show lived experiences.

On the other side of the hall, viewers are doing exactly what Julio Le Parc wanted to do with his installation ‘Zepelín de Acero’. His piece, which uses stainless steel and mirrors, encourages active engagement. People of all ages walk around the reflective pieces catching glimpses of themselves and others.

Carmine said the response this year had been overwhelmingly positive, adding that the commercial aspect of the Unlimited exhibition was a success.

The seventy projects are for sale, and because they are so large, the intended buyers are typically museums or private foundations. Installations such as Christo’s “Wrapped 1961 Volkswagen Beetle Saloon,” a reproduction of the artist’s earlier work, were offered for $4 million. Christo was known for these large-scale works, such as wrapping the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in 2021.

Carmine said everyone from art collectors to galleries and the general public has shown appreciation and amazement at the exhibition.

And, he added, the conversations appear to be sparking.

“What I was aiming for, it’s happening,” he said.