Shadwa Ali, who currently lives in Alexandria, Egypt, spent three months in the spring of 2025 on a residency at Atelier Mondial supported by Pro Helvetia. During this time, she continued her sound project Fireball, which she began in 2022 – an ongoing sound research project on urban soundscapes that maps how the planning of metropolises impacts the mental health and social behavior of their inhabitants. The artist explores how the perception and definition of “noise” differs between cities, as well as the places where the cultural fabric is permeated by musical rhythms and people themselves become instruments for rethinking and reshaping the future. Shadwa Ali’s sound installation How Basel Changed the World has become a dense tapestry of sound, a sonic portrait of Switzerland in which city noises, especially construction sites, are subtly and harmoniously intertwined with the sounds of nature. The title of the track is inspired by the book How Basel Changed the World (in German, Kleine Basler Weltgeschichte) by Daniel Hagmann and Matthias Buschle, which examines the role of the small Swiss city as a globally influential center of banking, pharmaceuticals, art, and education at various moments in history. It describes Basel as a quiet engine that has had a major impact on international finance, culture, and scientific innovation. Inspired by the book, as well as by daily walks and sound recordings in Basel and numerous other cities, villages, and small towns in Switzerland, she attempted – as Shadwa Ali explains in a statement – to capture the soundscapes and noises of Switzerland. In doing so, she realized that the concept and perception of noise vary greatly from region to region, even within a single country, depending on whether one is in a city, village, or small town. [Text by Alexandra Stäheli]

Shadwa Ali (b. 1990 in Alexandria, EG) lives and works in Alexandria, Egypt.

The title of the performance already speaks of a dialogue where one can be fully devoted to their conversation partner: Just the two of us. Nils Amadeus Lange and Mario Petrucci Espinoza developed this one-time performance specifically for the Kunsthaus on the occasion of the Museum Night. They draw on couple dances and also incorporate language, singing, and costumes – yet it is also more than just an interpersonal dialogue. With Just the two of us, the artist-performers also engage with the space and architecture that immediately surrounds them, which they experience in a sensual, bodily way. Gestures, movements, and discoveries spontaneously develop in the moment. And for the audience, too, the full focus is on the moment that can be experienced through this performance and then irretrievably passes. Much like a field of sound, the performance flows like waves through the entire Kunsthaus with dance, movement, language, and music – its architecture, the works exhibited, but also the people in it. In the moment experienced together, new, unfamiliar, poetic perspectives can open up. Instead of reason, the performers Lange and Espinoza propose an emotional approach – via the body, dance, language, and music – as a (new) way of accessing the (supposedly) familiar. [Text by Ines Goldbach]

Nils Amadeus Lange (b. 1989 in Cologne, DE) lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland. Mario Espinoza (b. 1995, VE) lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland.

The title of Hannah Cooke’s work Red Flags initially evokes the contemporary buzzword for warning signs in interpersonal relationships, especially when it comes to the abuse of power, misogyny, and toxic masculinity. In her artistic practice, Hannah Cooke addresses feminist issues and questions the system of the art world as well as who is granted a voice within it. The textiles on display at Kunsthaus Baselland respond to Pablo Picasso’s genius status in the art world and criticize his problematic treatment of women. More specifically, she references Picasso’s etching Minotaur Raping a Woman from the Vollard Suite, in which the artist stylizes himself as a minotaur. The three red flags in the Red Flags series – titled Wir müssen uns Sisyphos als eine glückliche Frau vorstellen (We must imagine Sisyphus as a happy woman), Den Stier bei den Hörnern packen (Grabbing the bully by the horns) and Schultern, (to shoulder) – show the artist wrangling, carrying, or rolling a white bull. The motifs refer to mythological depictions – an approach that also permeates Picasso’s art. Yet, the choice of textiles as a medium is a deliberate departure from Picasso’s work, since these materials, often associated with femininity, were not used in this way. In addition, Red Flags also refers to Picasso’s fondness for bullfighting, in which red cloths are waved before the bull as a provocation. Mein Täubchen (My little dove), on the other hand, refers to the dove of peace – another central motif in Picasso‘s work – and at the same time a term of endearment often used for women. The works on display at the Regionale deal with the artist’s primary concerns. They examine the cult of genius in the art context, the sanctity that male artists seem to enjoy, ask how we deal with this power imbalance, and open up new perspectives in the process. [Text by Eva Grüninger]

Hannah Cooke (b. 1986 in Munich, DE) lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Sonja Feldmeier’s works are always visually stunning – whether they’re sculptures, room-filling installations, or the video works that have always been a staple of her creative process. What’s striking is the diversity of her themes: the artist takes on big questions about ecology, feminism, memory, responsibility, and humanity. She never settles for less, and all without ever losing a sense of poetry. In Slow Fox, it is the fantastical and sensual aspects that initially captivate the viewer: large puddles of water seem to reflect the sky and giant trees dance almost weightlessly in different formations. Only upon getting closer does the scene reveal itself via the sounds of wood being felled, breaking and crashing, the whirring of rotor noises, and the artist’s whistling – at times shrill, loud, melodic, at others melancholic. Feldmeier’s multi-channel video work is based on her own recordings of the massive tree felling in Kleinlützel in Jura, not far from her second studio. 2,500 trees had to be cleared and transported away by helicopter in a very short time to avert an impending rockslide. What remains is a vast cut in the middle of an ecosystem that had developed over centuries – and a reverberating whistle that can almost be understood as a gesture of encouragement and defiance in the face of a formidable and violent present. [Text by Ines Goldbach]

Sonja Feldmeier (b. 1965 in Zurich, Switzerland) lives and works in Basel, Switzerland.

Since the beginning of Georg Gatsas’s artistic practice, portrait photography has played a central role. He shows people in urban environments like New York, London, or Berlin – often individuals connected with the club or music scene. This includes musician Lizzi Bougatsos, whom he portrays on stage. Surrounded by instruments and multicolored spotlights, Gatsas captures an unrepeatable moment that not only conveys great sensuality, but also creates a sense of immediate closeness to the subject. The images speak of solidarity, freedom, and diversity – stories that resonate beyond the moment, spreading and interconnecting both spatially and mentally. His new series Alberi (Trees) was recently created for the Biennale in Bregaglia, a small community in southeastern Switzerland. Sometimes in black and white, sometimes in color, the artist depicts these natural protagonists at dusk. Printed on swathes of fabric, the precise close-ups of trunks and branches seem to float like bodies in the space of Atelier Mondial. Rootedness in the earth, material presence, and its integration into a larger web are central themes, as are the unique surface of the bark and the characteristic branching. The emphasis on these special features is a gesture of appreciation for nonhuman beings and, at the same time, a consistent continuation of the artist’s multi-layered oeuvre, in which he never appears as a distant observer. [Text by Ines Tondar]

Georg Gatsas (b. 1978 in Grabs, CH) lives and works in 2025 in St.Gallen, Waldstatt, Zurich, Basel, and Scuol-Nairs, Switzerland.

Don’t expect to sit back and relax here. For many years, Bettina Grossenbacher’s works have transported viewers into places and situations of uncertainty – spaces that only slowly reveal themselves, at times seemingly fantastical, abandoned, and devoid of humans. They speak of what has become reliable or fragile in our era, of ecological and interpersonal tensions. It is often hard to imagine that the artist has ventured to these places herself: steep, inaccessible locations, politically risky situations. In her latest work, Stung by drought, we encounter objects reminiscent of archaic mud dwellings, abandoned caverns, accompanied by the swelling hum of insects. Towards the end, the camera steps back to show the whole picture and reveals the location: the apiary of Inzerki, located in the High Atlas Mountains, one of the oldest and largest beehives in the world. It once provided a regular income for a hundred Berber families, and the honey was considered one of the best in Morocco. Today, the bees are “stung by drought” and plagued by the heat. Their constant buzzing around a place marked by abandonment, uprooting, and ecological change, which now faces scarcity instead of abundance, tells of the longing search for a balance between the environment, humans, and nature. [Text by Ines Goldbach]

Bettina Grossenbacher (b. 1960 in Thun, CH) lives and works in Basel, Switzerland.

An immersive spatial cosmos unfolds as we walk between the many floating sculptures onto which Basel-based artist Victoria Holdt projects abstract moving images in a precise choreography. At times transparent and glowing from within, at others milky and opaque, without allowing a glimpse inside –they give the impression that something new is emerging, growing, or transforming here. Like a cocoon, their membrane envelops the interior –protecting it and at the same time holding it in a tense immobility. A fragile contradiction between security and vulnerability emerges, which is increasingly intensified by the soundtrack composed in collaboration with Thalles Piaget. The installation titled Simmering Shields was first shown at the exhibition Auswahl 24 at Aargauer Kunsthaus, where Victoria Holdt was awarded the jury prize as a guest artist. It embeds our moving bodies in a brooding and eerie environment that never comes to a standstill, and every moment can lead to a radical new beginning. [Text von Ines Tondar]

Victoria Holdt (b. 1992 in Uster, Switzerland) lives and works in Basel, Switzerland.

In keeping with the theme of this year’s Regionale, the idea of permeability and complexity plays a central role in Daniel Karrer’s artistic practice. The reverse glass paintings presented in a studio-like setting at Kunsthaus Baselland were created over several years and speak of painterly but also geological layering, of the condensation of (art) histories and spatial presences. The work Untitled (trawnegeG red ierelaM) was created especially for the exhibition and focuses on our perception of time. Past and future seem to flow into one another – only the transparency of the glass between them suggests a distance in the form of the present. With his reverse glass paintings, Daniel Karrer also explores the relationship between painting, digital images, and abstraction. The sensual materiality of painting lies hidden behind the glass, which in turn intensifies the radiance of the colors and evokes a digital image. This interplay between physical and digital presence is also reflected in the artist’s working process: he researches his image material online before creating his designs on the computer and then transferring them to glass. Daniel Karrer thus connects the illusionistic character of his technique with a multi-layered process of image construction. [Text by Eva Grüninger]

Daniel Karrer (b. 1983 in Basel, CH) lives and works in Basel, Switzerland.

The motif of the vessel runs throughout Karin Kurzmeyer’s work and can also be found in the Big Pots series on view at this year’s Regionale. The series, which has been ongoing for several years now, is driven by an interest in exploring the construction of vessels and the haptics of clay. Through her construction technique, the artist intuitively and playfully approaches the shaping and surface structure of each vessel. The unglazed objects derive their color solely from the different types of clay used and the different firing temperatures. Thus, the individual vessels seem like independent characters in the space, who nonetheless start to communicate with each other via their arrangement and quantity. This embodiment of form is further emphasized by the artist giving each vessel a feminine floral name: one is called Daisy, another Lilly, and a third Rosa. As a hollow space or void, the vessel absorbs other materials, enclosing and preserving them. Together, they become a single object. This interconnectedness that simultaneously preserves individuality is distinctive of the artist’s fascination and working method, and at the same time reflects the permeability of places. [Text by Eva Grüninger]

Karin Kurzmeyer (b. 1987 in Lucerne, CH) lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland.

The video installation Ecos Voraces (Echoes of the Voracious) by the Peru-based artist Josefina Leon Ausejo starts off like a road movie. We glide over the austere landscapes of the Andes, passing mountains and lakes, accompanied by the rush of wind and a song playing on the radio. Yet the footage captured by the artist – who completed her master’s at the FHNW’s Institute Art Gender Nature in 2022 – does not depict an idyll but a human-made panorama. Enormous machines have carved their way through steep rock faces in order to extract copper in the monumental Toromocho mine. Layer by layer, lines accumulate into enormous terraces that turn the mountain inside out, suddenly revealing a formal similarity to archaeological sites such as the ruins of Moray – as well as cultural landscapes, albeit ones primarily used for agriculture. A voiceover speaks of a ghost town, of relocation, broken promises, and above all an immense degree of exploitation. Between ruins and possibilities, past and future, fiction and documentation, nature and artifice, boundaries become permeable and appear as an urgent appeal for greater foresight: What are the conditions for a socially just and inclusive community, and how fragile are the ties that hold it together? How can sustainable coexistence even be imagined in the face of injustice, power imbalances, and destruction? In the end, what remains is a somber, sorrowful outlook in which multiple layers and complexities unfold –strata that require time, care, and serious engagement for us to work through in order to make any viable future conceivable. [Text by Ines Tondar]

Josefina Leon Ausejo (b. 1995 in Lima, PE) lives and works in Lima, Peru.

Fabio Luks’s painting practice has long been concerned with structures that simultaneously separate and connect – walls, partitions, and surfaces, elements that all conceal something while occasionally allowing a view in or out. In the works on paper presented in Kunsthaus Baselland as part of the Regionale, the artist revisits this theme. On the one hand, they seem to be a kind of preliminary research for the larger works in oil, which raise questions about perception, surface, and transgression. On the other hand, they continue these themes in an even wilder and more concrete form. Luks’s work is characterized by such causal Möbius loops – inextricable entanglements of cause and effect, beginning and end, the suspension of inside and out. And this is precisely what allows it to unfold its lively and surreal dreamlike cosmos. According to the artist’s own statement about his works on paper, he is “interested in how a supposedly solid structure, like a brick wall, can reveal itself to be something permeable, perhaps even alive.” In his drawings, the walls open up, revealing the rooms behind them, the sky, eyes or limbs stretching through them. He continues: “I find this interplay of visibility and concealment, of observing and being observed, very exciting. In addition, the canvases and picture-in-picture situations used to depict the spaces also refer to the act of painting itself, to thinking about seeing, abou the image as a place between inside and outside.” The theme of permeability, which the artist experiences firsthand in the tri-national region, is a central component of his work. Just as the borders between countries are palpable but dissolve in everyday life, his works repeatedly reflect the experience of spaces opening up, making both separation and connection palpable at the same time. [Text by Alexandra Stäheli]

Fabio Luks (b.1982 in Biel, CH) lives and works in Basel, Switzerland.

The term “permeability” comes from the Latin permeabilis and refers to how much one substance allows others to pass through it. Elia Menang Setiadi’s works are dedicated to this principle of being in motion – the permeation of spaces, states, and levels of perception. His artistic process starts with curiosity, collecting, and observation, allowing him to open doors to different spaces and interests. In the work exhibited at the Regionale, the artist observes the rhythm, texture, sound, and noises of words and language that appeal to the senses. In doing so, he examines the interplay and stimulating power of thoughts and feelings, as well as sensory and speech organs. In his visual language, shifting states of flowing, pausing, moving on, and returning can be experienced – states that are present in other universes, but also in the here and now. The sculptural installation of ten paintings combines different media. Detached from the wall, it permeates the space and evokes a paravent – a word derived from the French terms parer (to ward off) and vent (wind) to describe an object that stops wind from blowing through the room. [Text by Eva Grüninger]

Elia Menang Setiadi (b. 2000 in Bern, CH) lives and works in Basel, Switzerland

Miriam Schmitz’s artistic practice creates moments of tension out of the otherwise decorative, concealing aspects of furniture and textiles. The artist uses found materials from the interior designs of spaces. For example, the work Night-Me-Twin-Set was created as part of the Meubles series and takes its cue from the transparency of an organza fabric that is commonly used for light boxes. The features and materialities of such found relics, in turn, serve as her starting point and determine her subsequent process. She selects the materials in relation to their personal history and cultural background, repurposes them, or brings them into new combinations. In this way, she gives the sculptural object a new, self-contained being. The works also speak of bygone times and the spaces the objects once inhabited. The artist thus addresses a socially widespread desire to simultaneously be in several places at different times. Accordingly, the objects are transformed into vessels of memory that evoke longing and curiosity for new arrangements and possibilities. [Text by Eva Grüninger]

Miriam Schmitz (b. 1988 in Cologne, DE) lives and works in Karlsruhe, Deutschland.

Right across from Kunsthaus Baselland, a monumental image by artist Marcia Tello Cornejo unfolds. Part banner, part veil, it envelops the entrance area of the TransBona Hall, which used to be a warehouse for logistics companies for many years. On the Dreispitz compound still visibly marked by its industrial past, an idealized panorama emerges with waterfalls, passing seagulls, and swans stretching their necks towards each other. With this scene that almost borders on kitsch, the Peruvian artist, who is currently completing her master’s degree at the FHNW’s Institute Art Gender Nature in Basel, brings into focus ideas that were constructed by European colonial powers in particular. Colonial ideologies romanticized non-European nature as “fertile,” “wild,” “uninhabited,” and “untouched” in order to make it rhetorically available for their own exploitative purposes. Such images and narratives served to stoke desires for adventure, land, and raw materials. And those ideas continue shape our idea of “landscape” to this day, with a significant afterlife in art, advertising, and tourism. By taking up the image of the “tropical paradise” – which also appears in the painting on the upper floor of the Kunsthaus – the artist raises awareness about the instrumentalization of the concept of nature and invites us to think about “nature” not as a passive resource, but to consider the power relations inscribed in it. The motif of the transparent banner, like that of the curtain, raises the question of what lies hidden behind the ideas we project onto it and draws attention to the mechanisms that produce our images of “nature” in the first place. [Text by Ines Tondar]

Marcia Tello Cornejo (b. 2000 in Lima, PE) lives and works in Basel and Lima, Peru.

Helena Uambembe lends a presence to histories that might otherwise risk going forgotten. The Angolan-South African artist, who lives in Berlin and also currently in Basel, often uses playfully light, at times amusing forms and inviting works to these ends – and yet the topics could hardly be more difficult or weighty. Having fled the civil war in Angola with her family during the 1970s, the artist grew up in Pomfret – a place whose postcolonial history has in many ways been erased, with Europe bearing direct responsibility for it. The men who fled Angola and landed in the refugee camps of Namibia were confronted with a choice: either get sent back home or join the military of South Africa’s apartheid regime. Since turning back wasn’t an option for most, their only other alternative was to commit within a month to marrying an Angolan woman who had also fled and starting a family with her. With the end of the Cold War and Namibia’s impending independence, these soldiers, who became the 32nd Battalion, were transferred to Pomfret in the Kalahari Desert in northwestern South Africa in 1989. There, they were deployed to suppress the growing uprisings of activists in the townships and to work in hazardous asbestos mining. Although the South African government sought to demolish Pomfret in 2004 and cut off all important supply structures, the people stayed. “It is important to remember,” Uambembe says in conversation, “who we are and where we come from, and that we remember our own and collective histories, which would otherwise be forgotten or whose true course would not be remembered.” [Text by Ines Goldbach]

Helena Uambembe (b. 1994, in Pomfret, ZA) lives and works in Berlin, German.

The various aspects of Noémie Vidonne’s art all revolve around memories, dreams, and sites – whether mental or physical. She consistently creates scenes of spaces that she herself has traversed mentally. The Regionale’s theme of the permeability of places was thus already inherent in her work, as she asks where the places she wanders through in her dreams come from and why they cannot be localized in reality or consciousness. Noémie Vidonne atmospherically recreates these places from her dreams and memories, designing them almost like a film set in physical space which allows visitors to experience new environments charged with the artist’s personal memories and her family history. For the exhibition Ce qui traverse, Vidonne compiled a selection of previously produced works that all share the theme of “interval.” The etchings, embedded in a felt frame, presented fictional landscapes that stem from the artist’s dream world –  traces of landscapes she may have traveled through in her dreams. For some time now, Noémie Vidonne has also been exploring the technique of intarsia, which is widespread in Alsace and evokes memories of the decorations in her grandparents’ homes and traditional restaurants. She transfers childhood memories onto these inlay works in the form of stickers, but does not apply the stickers directly to the surface because she suspects they might then get lost. For the artist, the stickers thus become symbols of the fear of being lost or forgotten. [Text by Alexandra Stäheli]

Noémie Vidonne (b. 1999, FR) lives and works in Mulhouse, France.

In her work Between Sights, artist Chi-Hun Yang opens up a view through a large window into a greenhouse in the botanical garden. At the same time, we see the reflections of the space we occupy as viewers. For some time now, the artist has been exploring the reflective boundaries that shape urban life, as well as the cultural, psychological, social, and symbolic concepts inscribed in mirrors and reflections. The artist understands the dual nature of window glass – allowing the gaze to pass through while remaining physically impenetrable – as a metaphor for social, cultural, and interpersonal barriers: “shaped by habitus, values, or ways of thinking.” For Yang, who sees herself as straddling different worlds, these transparent divisions that accompany us every day raise the question: “Who belongs, what is left out, and why?” Because glass can also reflect, the boundaries can be temporarily lifted, and two separate worlds connect: the outside and the inside, here and there. Yang thinks of this property of glass as a “primordial virtual reality” – an early form of the imaginary. [Text by Martina Stähli]

Chi-Hun Yang (b. 1979, in Kiel, DE) lives and works in Basel, Switzerland.