Kunsthalle Basel is pleased to present the first major exhibition of the Belgian artists Jos de Gruyter (*1965, Geel) and Harald Thys ( *1966, Wilrijk) in Switzerland, entitled PROJEKT 13.

Collaborating since the end of the 1980s, the artists have developed an intriguing body of work, consisting of films, photographs, drawings and performances. The figures in their films and photographs share a condition of autistic detachment from each other and from their surroundings. Trapped by their actions and acting without empathy, they have reached another level of interaction, one in which spiritual powers prevail. In this parallel world, inside and outside are estranged from one another.

In the work of de Gruyter and Thys, the notion of closed systems is made physically explicit. For their exhibition at Le Plateau in Paris, in 2007, the artists had the whole exhibition space painted grey, including the windows, isolating the viewer from the outside. Similarly, for the 5th berlin biennial (2008) the artists mounted industrial doors in the cellar, where their video was on view, in order to emphasize the separation from the rest of the exhibition. Most recently at Culturgest in Lisbon, a cultural foundation located in a bank building, they transformed the exhibition spaces in such a way — they used the bank’s PVC flooring to blanket both their own floor and their pedestals — as to dissolve the superficial borders between the two institutions.

For Kunsthalle Basel, de Gruyter and Thys came up with a display structure that not only keeps the outside world at a distance, but also viewers themselves. Consisting of a large number of wooden partitions in regular arrangements throughout the galleries, the structure is conceived as a labyrinth that effectively blocks the visitors’ view of each other while they stroll around. On these panels, de Gruyter and Thys display approximately 500 new drawings on paper. The origins of these drawings lie in a ‘dirty dark mix of found images of everything and nothing’, from airplanes, openings, amateur theatre, and animals to buildings, pots and pans, sunglasses and dishes. The artists meticulously and painstakingly traced these images like monks to create an idiosyncratic visual encyclopaedia: a time-consuming project the exhibition title PROJEKT 13 refers to. De Gruyter and Thys describe it as ‘a project of an indefinable group of technocrats, a higher instance that looks back on earthly existence and traces everything it comes across’.

In this staged world, the colour white prevails, neutralising difference. All images are treated in the same way, traced with the same soft pencil onto white paper. Similarly, the white enigmatic male heads are characterized by neutrality. Set on white high pedestals towering over the display of drawings, they stare onto the white exhibition walls with a petrified, eternal gaze. These are two variations on “De Drie Wijsneuzen van Erembodegem” (The Three Wise-Noses of Erembodegem), originally conceived as a proposal for a roundabout sculpture near the village Erembodegem in Flanders. These sculptural heads also observe the visitors of the exhibition, who not only find their gazes returned by them but also by the figures in some of the drawings. This focus on the act of looking is a recurrent element in the artists’ work, which takes on different forms and is equally present in people, animals and things: passive, aggressive, inward, outward, threatening, frightening.

The exhibition leads the visitors towards a film in the last room, presented in a specially constructed auditorium with an enormous beamer, a huge screen and rows of benches, similar to those used in Protestant churches. The monstrous beamer, elevated above the visitor, becomes animated and is not unlike the sculptural heads in the other rooms. The film is a study of the relationship between the real world and the parallel world and how they influence each other. The film supports the hypothetical tendency to visualise this parallel world as one-dimensional. It is a world where time and space are of a different order, a one-dimensional white world without light or dark.

In-kind sponsorship support has been provided by Vidi-Square

Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys recently had solo shows at Culturgest, Lisbon; Kaleidoscope, Milan; Pro Choice, Vienna; Dépendance, Brussels (all 2009); Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin (2008); Frac Ile-de-France/le Plateau (duo exhibition with François Curlet), Paris (2007); Middelheim Museum, Antwerp (2002). They have participated in numerous group exhibitions, including: The Filmic Conventions, FormContent, London; All That is Solid Melts into Air/The Thing, MUHKA, Antwerp; Un scene, Wiels; The Invisible Hand, Sommer Contemporary Art project space, Tel Aviv; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (all 2009); Manifesta 7, Trento; When Things Cast No Shadow - the 5th berlin biennial for contemporary art, Berlin (both 2008); The Go-Between, de Appel, Amsterdam (2007); La Belgique Visionaire, Bozar Brussels (2005); Marking the Territory, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2001).

Kunsthalle Basel is proud to present Nasreen Mohamedi. Notes - Reflections on Indian Modernism. This exhibition is one of the first international solo presentations of Nasreen Mohamedi (1937–1990), an artist who occupies a unique position in the history of art practice in India as well as in the history of Modernist abstraction. She is regarded as one of the most important Indian artists of her generation and her paintings, drawings and photographs produced from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, constitute a key body of work within the modernist canon.

Little known outside of India, Mohamedi’s work has in recent years attracted increasing attention and critical acclaim. This exhibition brings together for the first time a comprehensive collection of works by Mohamedi including a series of major drawings, photographs and studies, as well as an extensive and previously unseen archival display.

Born in Karachi in 1937, Nasreen Mohamedi moved with her family to Mumbai (then Bombay) at the age of seven. In 1954, she travelled abroad to study – in London at Saint Martin’s School of Art (1954–57) and in Paris on a scholarship from the French government. After she returned to India she lived in Bombay, Delhi and finally settled in Baroda, where she became a teacher in the prestigious Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University in 1972. In Baroda, Mohamedi produced what has come to be seen as her classic work: small-scale, abstract geometric drawings, painstakingly composed using pencil and pen – working with the grid and deviating from it with the use of diagonal lines. Virtually alone amongst her peers in India who generally favoured a figurative narrative style, her lineage can be traced back to an earlier generation of Indian artists engaged with abstraction such as V.S. Gaitonde. Other parallels for her practice can be drawn to Agnes Martin’s works on paper, or to Kazimir Malevich and the Suprematists’ invocation of an utopian abstraction. Despite Mohamedi’s cosmopolitanism, her work also reflects her identity as a female Indian artist working during the second half of the twentieth century as the subcontinent, its landscapes, urban centres and Islamic heritage are often intimated in her work, particularly her photographs.

The exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel includes Mohamedi’s collages, studies, drawings and photographs from the 1960s to the late 1980s. Mohamedi rarely signed or dated her work, but they fall roughly into three different periods. Her early works – water colours and ink on paper, oil on canvas, collage and lithography - were lyrical and semi-abstract. In the 1970s she moved closer to abstraction, and by the end of the decade she was producing serial works based on the grid on square sheets of paper- these became a hallmark of her practice. During the final phase of her work in the 1980s, Mohamedi abandoned the grid and began to compose geometric shapes, including combinations of diagonal lines, triangles and spheres, which were suspended within an empty ground. Mohamedi consistently produced photographs as a visual record of the places she visited. Although she never regarded them as works in their own right, today they constitute a key part of her oeuvre.

The exhibition encompasses a range of extensive archival material - biographical data such as snap shots, invitation cards and contemporary reviews, and ephemera collected from her studio: calendars, letters from the Arabic alphabet, magazine cuttings with notations, sketches and photographic experiments. While the biographical information paints a portrait of the artist and her professional life, the ephemera collected from her studio reveal Mohamedi’s working process and the way she developed a language that is both visual and conceptual.

Curated by Suman Gopinath and Grant Watson, Nasreen Mohamedi: Notes is initiated by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway. It is organized by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway in collaboration with Kunsthalle Basel.

Suman Gopinath is a curator and the founder and director of CoLab Art & Architecture, Bangalore, India.
Grant Watson is a curator at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (MuHKA), Antwerp, Belgium. Gopinath and Watson have been collaborating on exhibitions of modern and contemporary Indian art since 1999.

The exhibition architecture has been designed by Piotr Brzoza, Basel.