Art Basel Parcours
2026
Curated by Stefanie Hessler, Director of the Swiss Institute in New York, Parcours is Art Basel’s public art sector where installations are spread throughout the city of Basel. Located in the basement of the KLARA food court, a five minute walk from the main fair, Nicole Coson exhibits Some place, within here (2024), a towering installation featuring aluminum-cast Aklan oyster shells threaded between interlocking metal loops hanging from the ceiling. The work explicitly mimics the structures used to aquafarm oysters in Aklan, a Visayan province in the Philippines, where these mollusks are cultivated on bamboo grids, dangling beneath the ocean’s surface. As they age, the undercurrent leaves its record in rings on their shells, place and time made physical. The location is not incidental: KLARA is a food court where international cuisines meet, a daily enactment of the same movement of food and culture that Coson's work traces.
The installation arrives in Basel following its presentation in Thresholds of Becoming, the 40th anniversary exhibition of esea contemporary, the UK's leading East and Southeast Asian art institution, where Coson was one of six invited artists exhibited.
Photos by Julian Blum
