Conscious Artists Using Their Voice for Change at Art Basel 2024

We have curated a selection of artists showcased by Art Basel, highlighting global conversations about climate change, social justice, and cultural ancestry

Founded by gallerists in 1970, @artbasel is the leading global platform connecting collectors, galleries, and artists. Art Basel's fairs in Basel, Hong Kong, Paris, and Miami Beach, as well as its Online Viewing Rooms, are a driving force in supporting galleries as they nurture artists' careers. Art Basel's Initiatives strive to create unique artist-led experiences and strengthen local art scenes. Until June 16th, this year’s edition of the Art Basel in Basel show will be open to the public.

©Yto Barrada

Yto Barrada

The French-Moroccan artist has received countless accolades. Her films, paintings, and sculptures have been exhibited in prestigious institutions, from the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam to Mathaf in Doha. Yet she’s also always maintained a foot in the ‘real’ world. After a stint in Beirut, where she worked at the Arab Image Foundation, in 2006, she cofounded the Cinémathèque de Tanger, which saved a historical movie theatre from destruction and has become her hometown’s cultural epicentre. Also in Tangier, she recently opened The Mothership, a garden dedicated to the cultivation of traditional dyes, which features, as she explains below, a research centre, a library, and an education program – among many other things. Here, Barrada tells me how it came to be, what’s been achieved, and what still needs to be done.

©Sara Flores

Sara Flores

A member of the Shipibo-Conibo People, she speaks about living in harmony with nature, her connection to her ancestral lands, and the values at the core of her life.

‘We have Spanish names, but also ‘true names’ of the kind that were used before European colonisation. True names are kept quite confidential or used for intimate settings only among family. They are conferred on us in different circumstances by our grandparents, who name us after someone skilled, hard-working, or strong so that we share some of those same qualities when we grow older. We may be named by the midwife at the time when the umbilical cord is cut. Other times, we are named by the healer in a curing session. You can call me Sara Flores, but my true name is Soi Biri. The terms translate as something dazzling, beautiful to watch, smooth, and well-ordered. Funnily enough, these are often the words used when people talk about my work.’

©Marina Perez Simão

Marina Perez Simão

Anyone who has travelled through Minas Gerais, the Brazilian state in which Marina Perez Simão spent part of her childhood, will recognise the deep red that often appears in the artist’s paintings. It recalls the clay soil excavated by the pervasive mining industry or the ochre puddles of its remote potholed roads. In one of Perez Simão’s untitled works from 2020, a valley of orange is scored with a blood red; in another one (she never titles them), featured in her 2021 solo show at Sifang Art Museum in Nanjing, a huge sun sags heavy over burning orange hills.

‘Landscape is very important for Brazilian artists,’ the artist says. ‘It's always there because it's so imposing. The weather, too. It will be hot, and then the rain comes out of the blue. It is very dramatic in terms of colour and how it affects our behaviour.’

Perez Simão also spent time in Rio de Janeiro and the city plays a role in her work too. Her washy, inviting blues and deep greens recall its iconic bay hemmed in by mountains, while blocks of twilight color are inspired by its brooding skies.

©Nguyen Trinh Thi

Nguyen Trinh Thi

Nguyen Trinh Thi is a Hanoi-based independent filmmaker and video/media artist. Her diverse practice has consistently investigated the role of memory in the necessary unveiling of hidden, displaced or misinterpreted histories and examined the position of artists in Vietnamese society.

Nguyen studied journalism, photography, international relations and ethnographic film in the United States. Her films and video artworks have been shown at festivals and art exhibitions, including Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; the Lyon Biennale 2015; Asian Art Biennial 2015, Taiwan; Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial 2014; Singapore Biennale 2013; Jakarta Biennale 2013; Oberhausen International Film Festival; Bangkok Experimental Film Festival; Artist Films International; DEN FRIE Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; and Kuandu Biennale, Taipei.

Nguyen is the founder and director of Hanoi DOCLAB, an independent centre for documentary film and moving image art in Hanoi since 2009. The Thailand Biennale commission featured above uses a water turbine with sensors, hydrophone, and wi-fi system to collect real-time data of the Mekong River’s water flow on the Thai-Lao border, to trigger mallets that play a deconstructed ranat ek, a type of Thai xylophone, whose 22 wooden bars are installed within the Haw Kham pavilion in Chiang Rai amid Lanna objects and artefacts.

©Emilija Škarnulytė

Emilija Škarnulytė

Emilija Škarnulytė (b. Vilnius, Lithuania 1987) is an artist and filmmaker.

Working between documentary and the imaginary, Škarnulytė makes films and immersive installations exploring deep time and invisible structures, from the cosmic and geologic to the ecological and political. Her blind grandmother gently touches the weathered statue of a Soviet dictator. Neutrino detectors and particular colliders measure the cosmos with otherworldly architecture. Post-human species swim through submarine tunnels above the Arctic Circle and crawl through tectonic fault lines in the Middle Eastern desert.

Connection and separation are always movements in the context of a river. Emilija Škarnulytė’s single-channel video installation Æqualia (2023), presented at the 14th Gwangju Biennale in 2023, visualises that oscillation by following a mermaid swimming between the milk-tea waters of the Rio Solimões and the ink-black currents of the Rio Negro.

©Otobong Nkanga

Otobong Nkanga

With a longtime eco-conscious practice and an organic farm, the Nigeria-born artist imagines other possible worlds.

‘Humans are only a small, minute part of the ecosystem,’ ‘but we as beings have forgotten this.’

It’s an observation that reverberates throughout the Nigerian-born, Antwerp-based artist’s urgent, challenging, and yet ultimately optimistic practice, which ranges from drawings to large-scale installations, from performances to projects in the social realm. To see the world through Nkanga’s eyes is to see not merely a stage on which Homo sapiens play out their all too often solipsistic and (self-) destructive dramas but rather to see a shared habitat, in which what she terms countless ‘life forms’ (which include fauna and flora as well as soil and rivers, seas and mountains) coexist, connected in a great web of being.

Currently the subject of a solo exhibition, ‘Craving for Southern Light’ at IVAM València, Spain – a show that is, among other things, a meditation on weather, light, and heat – Nkanga is also a totemic presence in the Hayward Gallery, London’s environmentally-focused summer group exhibition ‘Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis’. The Hayward show is billed as inspired by the artist’s proposition that ‘caring is a form of resistance’. What this means, says Nkanga, is that attentiveness to ‘other types of life that do not have a voice as we do’ is the basis for countering ‘what the economy has to say, what capital has to say, what politicians decide’ about the non-human elements of our ecosystem. At a time of planetary emergency, such care is what’s needed to ensure ‘the possibility of existence’ in the critical years to come.

©Rayan Yasmineh

Rayan Yasmineh

Born in 1996 in France to a Lebanese mother and Palestinian father, Rayan Yasmineh spent part of his childhood and adolescence in Jordan. Graduating from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2022, the artist is represented by the Parisian Gallery Mor Charpentier. The architecture, colours, objects, landscapes, and characters – all the elements present in Yasmineh’s paintings recall various countries and cultures from across the Arab, Persian, and Western worlds. Created with impressive meticulousness, many of his works resemble perfectly lit photographs. 

In The Flower of Damascus and Abdelkader (2023), the artist replaces the figure of the 19th-century Algerian emir Abdelkader – the man who led the struggle against the French colonial invasion of Algiers – with one of his friends, who happens to share the same name, also of Algerian origin. Instead of the keffiyeh, the friend poses in a Lacoste jacket with an Algerian soccer shirt over his shoulder.

©Precious Okoyomon

Precious Okoyomon

Through their work, poet and artist Precious Okoyomon explores the intricate interplay between nature, chaos, and regeneration. Raised in the expanses of Ohio’s Midwest, Okoyomon’s formative years were steeped in the natural world. ‘My first love is very much the Earth, the soil,’ they say in this new episode of ‘Meet the artists.’ The sentiment informs their multifaceted practice, encompassing installations, poetry, and culinary arts. Characterised by what they describe as an ‘organic flow’ in their work, each medium seamlessly intersects with the others to create ‘the endless poem.’

Their invasive garden installations frequently feature kudzu, a vine introduced to the American South post-slavery, which Okoyomon employs as a potent metaphor for colonisation. The kudzu’s unrestrained growth overtakes a space, embodying chaos and natural reclamation themes. ‘What dies, dies. What grows is sprung up inside of that. And the beauty of everything is that it regenerates,’ they explain, underscoring the cyclical nature of their practice.