Where Art Breaks Free: Standout Installations At Art Basel's Unlimited 2025

Forbes

6 hours ago

Messe Basel
Art Basel has opened its doors today for the preview days, ahead of the public opening on Thursday, 19 June 2025. One of its most compelling sectors is Unlimited - a space dedicated to ambitious, large-scale works that push beyond the confines of the traditional fair booth. Curated by Giovanni Carmine, it brings together monumental installations, immersive video works, expansive sculptures, and live performances in a setting designed for bold artistic expression.
Below, a selection of my personal highlights from this year's edition:
Marinella Senatore, We Rise by Lifting Others (2023)
Presented by Mazzoleni
The first work you see as you enter Unlimited, Marinella Senatore's illuminated sculpture sets the tone. Bold and bright, it draws on the tradition of Southern Italian festival lights - welcoming, communal, and full of presence.
WE RISE BY LIFTING OTHERS
Her message is simple but resonant. Senatore's work often begins with people: collective energy, shared authorship, and moments of coming together. Here, that spirit is made visible in light and language. A powerful opening gesture - uplifting in more ways than one.
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Ayan Farah, Desert Seeds, 2025
Presented by Kadel Willborn (Düsseldorf) and Galerie Nordenhake (Berlin, Mexico City, Stockholm) in Unlimited
Ayan Farah's Desert Seeds is a 12-meter-long wall piece dyed with clay from Somalia's Sanaag region, where her parents were born, and cloud-seeded water from the UAE, where she was born. Embroidered with images of extinct desert plants, the work unfolds as a quiet meditation on memory, migration, and belonging.
Desert Seeds by Ayan Farah, 2025, Courtesy of Galerie Nordenhake and Kadel Willborn, photo by Simon ... More Vogel5
Farah's practice is rooted in movement - of people, materials, and meaning. Drawing from her Somali-Swedish heritage and nomadic upbringing, she collects natural pigments and vintage fabrics from across the globe, working with organic and earth-derived materials treated through slow, elemental processes of dyeing, bleaching, and exposure to light.
Ayun Farah, Dessert Seeds, close up of embroidery
Her work resists linear narratives. It brings together opposing forces: history and erosion, order and improvisation, nature and abstraction. In Desert Seeds, the earth becomes both medium and message, layered with time, intention, and the weight of personal and collective histories.
Latifa Echakhch: Untitled (Tears Fall), 2025
Presented by PACE and kaufmann repetto, in collaboration with Dvir Gallery.
Being shown for the first time at Unlimited, Latifa Echakhch's work forms a delicate, glimmering curtain of nylon threads, each tipped with glass spheres and strung with beads suspended at varying heights. The work evokes the moment water strikes a surface - frozen in both descent and ascent.
Latifa Echakhch: Untitled (Tears Fall), 2025
Referencing the push and pull between sorrow and hope, Echakhch transforms water into a metaphor for emotional duality. In her view, beauty persists - even in collapse.
In God We Trust, Danh Vo', 2020
Presented by White Cube
Thirteen steel stars and a stack of firewood form the bones of Vo's quiet yet charged reflection on the American experiment. Based on the 1777 flag of the original 13 colonies, the work translates national symbolism into raw material. Stars are forged in metal, stripes are built from logs.
"In God We Trust, 2020" Danh Vo
First shown at White Cube in London during the lead-up to the 2020 U.S. election, the piece was dismantled over time, with the wood burned to heat the gallery's fireplaces. As the flag vanished, only stars and ash remained—an image of disintegration, or perhaps transformation.
Vo's ongoing examination of empire and identity unfolds here as both monument and elegy. The work is as much about collapse as it is about the constant reshaping of political meaning.
Nadira Husain, The Haunted Museum, 2025
Presented by PSM (Berlin) in collaboration with Hua International (Berlin, Beijing)
Since the 1920s, the bust of the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti has drawn crowds to Berlin's Neues Museum. In The Haunted Museum, Nadira Husain offers a different vision: what if the queen had arrived in Germany today?
Her freestanding wooden triptych shows Nefertiti not on a pedestal, but in everyday life - painted in bold colors, wearing Adidas tracksuits, navigating a new reality. Blending satire with historical critique, Husain reflects on the legacy of colonial-era acquisitions and asks what restitution might mean in a contemporary context.
Nadira Husain, The Haunted Museum, 2025 / Presented by PSM (Berlin) in collaboration with Hua ... More International (Berlin, Beijing)
Luiz Zerbini, Os Comedores de Terra (Earth Eaters), 2025
Presented jointly by Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel (São Paulo) and Sikkema Jenkins & Co. (New York).
A five-meter panoramic painting on a freestanding installation. On the reverse, mineral elements (crystals, stones, and ore) are embedded directly into the structure.
Courtesy Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo:Rio de Janeiro
The work draws from images of gold mining in the Amazon, referencing extractive practices like logging and slash-and-burn farming. A rainbow film of gasoline shimmers across a pit of water; smoke rises among felled trees. Zerbini's intricate, layered composition immerses the viewer in a landscape both vibrant and violated.
Courtesy Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo:Rio de Janeiro
As the artist notes, 'The laws that guide painting are similar to those that guide nature—they follow similar principles, such as coexistence, tension, triggers and understanding.'
Lee Ufan, Relatum - Dialogue 2005/2023
presented by Lisson Gallery
In the middle of the fair's energy, Lee Ufan's Relatum - Dialogue offers a rare moment of stillness. Heavy steel plates lie in quiet dialogue with raw stones - nothing forced, nothing decorative. Just material, presence, and space.
Lee Ufan's Larger Than Life Installation at Art Basel's Unlimited Sector
His works are never about spectacle. They ask you to pause, to consider weight, distance, and the invisible relationships between objects. It's part of a practice he's been developing for decades - deeply influenced by Mono-ha and shaped by both Korean and Japanese philosophies. There's a quiet kind of clarity in this installation. The kind that doesn't need explanation.