Walking on Fumes at Liste 2026
Post-Fair Notes on Artistic Tendencies
Walking on Fumes at Liste 2026
Post-Fair Notes on Artistic Tendencies
At 30, Liste Art Fair no longer needs to prove a point. Outgrowing its famed ‘Young Art Fair’ moniker after moving from Werkraum Warteck to Messe Basel, its legacy continues to promise a blue-chip future akin to David Zwirner. Admission is difficult. Yet year after year, Liste flattens the ground ready for the next artist to crack open and emerge.
The 2026 edition featured 105 galleries from 36 countries. Forty-one were first-timers. Artist-run initiatives took over the “Wall” section with independently curated projects, bypassing the redesigned architecture altogether. And for full disclosure: Last year, I participated in Liste as an artist. This year, my film is in the program, but I came as a tourist. Or at least tried to be.
The best time to visit Liste is while Art Basel hosts one of its openings. Arriving after Liste’s VIP day, the doors swung open at noon. The marathon had just begun. I was already walking on fumes. No corner was left unprogrammed. The Foyer was transformed by fresh-faced project space Daisy Chain and writer-curator Juliette Desourgues. Density continues upstairs with Spine Book Forum, an Anders Clausen x Carhartt WIP collab, and a couple of art prizes, talks, and live performances.
However, the gallery floor itself was calm, cool, and confident. It was so quiet I could hear myself complaining about the art world’s affair with “artistic tendency,” a noncommittal placeholder that demands great intellectual labor from both artist and audience. Yet every apparent shenanigan was a highly strategic, fleshed-out proposal. Art fatigue post-fair causes memory loss, so I took notes. Here they are.
Post-photography forbids an image to be just an image.
Twelve years after Robert Shore claimed it was merely “a moment, not a movement,” the medium remains stubbornly present. At Cibrián, Margaux Moonen Guillaume treated photographic prints as a foundational layer for textiles stained with ink, varnish, and oil. In Lustre, a chandelier print on positives was sandwiched within stained cotton-tarlatan. In Good Morning, golden-hour shadows were obscured by sheer cotton and pencil shavings. Elsewhere, Wei Leng Tay reworked archival photos of a 1963 ikebana competition in Penang. Vyatautas Kumzâ’s framed photographs featured protruding objects. Giorgos Tigkas showed a feet pic in a leatherette frame with green tape.
There was a pop quiz, and the artists spelled out words.
At Matteo Cantarella, an updated survey by Maryam Jafri introduced a new word: “Manopause?!” Coco Klockner took out a few words and turned them into a 7-part artwork titled Letters of Support 01–07. Larry Johnson spelled out SUPERCALIFORNIAFAGGOTEXPIALIDOCIOUS with O-Townhouse in a gray-yellow color-block painting. (Myth is that if you say it three times, the ghost of a gay icon will appear.)
Spatial dominance made a power move.
Kelechi Amaka Madumere, the recipient of the Helvetia Art Prize, installed a striking monument. Here, a figure in mismatched patterns stood still, overlooking a pastel entanglement of violence and power. Mapping a transient approach, Aurora Arazzi walked the streets of Seoul, gathered objects such as a cat tooth and glass shards, and placed them between the folds of tracing paper.
In the garden of decay were bread and sawdust.
Through baking bread, Kemil Bekteši reflected on his father, labor, migration, and resilience. At Paulina Caspari, The End of the Muse begins a rusting romance. Belgian artist Vincent Sheers gardens decay; butterflies were sucking pollen from an oscilloscope. Metal flowers sprang from a moss-gilded head. In a more insidious intervention, Ruofan Chen left dust on the floor at Shower. By suspending a wooden sculpture, Chen revealed a “hidden ecology” in which art workers are exposed to ambient toxins, such as sawdust.
Artists are painting a montage for an episode.
At Margot Samel, Mariann Metsis arranged oil paintings of wigs, eyes, and faces into fragmented, cinematic episodes. A booked-and-busy Antonio Lopez offered two striking canvases: a blackout on folded canvas and a fish-head fever dream. A shisha-drawing acted as a palate cleanser.
Philosophy is so hardcore, it extends a bender.
All the way at the back, Emanuel de Carvalho staged a philosophical dialogue. Using Derrida and Malabou as conceptual metaphors, the work suspended function and deferred meaning. It featured a sculpture that deliberately blocked the viewer’s glance toward a lonesome painting of an empty classroom. At the opposite part of the spectrum, at TINA, Katie Shannon presented a makeshift structure of things that resist endings. Imagine a friend wanting to extend last night’s bender, never wanting to surrender the good time, telling you, “HARDCORE TIL I DIE.”
I’d be remiss to start a petition for Liste to replace the term ‘artistic tendency’. The phrase, no matter how vague-sounding, defines its pulse. At thirty, it is no longer young, nor does it want to be. It has evolved into a sophisticated maker of the ‘emerging artist.’
Last Updated on July 3, 2026
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About the author:
Augustine Paredes is an artist, writer, and photographer, based between Frankfurt and London.
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