A key figure in Canadian art, Geneviève Cadieux combines theater, cinema, and photography to explore how we communicate and how we perceive what others are trying to convey. In her photographic triptych Hear Me with Your Eyes, she turns the gaze into something almost physical: Three enlarged fragments of a face confront the viewer with close-ups of skin, light, and gesture. Cadieux treats photography as a surface on which traces of pain, anxiety, and vulnerability accumulate, while allowing the image to become a screen for projection and self-recognition. Arranged as a quasi-cinematic sequence, the three photographs alternate between black-and-white and color, intensifying the installation’s emotional charge. The final image in the series, centered on slightly parted lips, renders an unheard sound into a condition of visibility. Hear Me with Your Eyes proposes an expanded mode of perception—listening with the eyes, reading the image as if it were text, and recognizing seeing as a form of feeling. (Ferran Barenblit)

Esther Ferrer is one of the pioneers of action art in Spain. Her work is shaped by performative gestures in which apparently objective systems such as time and mathematics become unpredictable. For her, self-portraiture is not a genre but a method. It is a way of measuring time and thinking about duration, including its emotional and social dimensions. Since the early 1980s, Ferrer has repeatedly photographed her portrait from the same angle and under similar environmental conditions, turning repetition into an analytical tool. In El libro de las cabezas: Autorretrato en el tiempo, Ferrer cuts and recombines these images to construct a single yet mutable face. The resulting image is both coherent and fragmented, holding identity and transformation in tension. Time here is not represented as something external to the artwork; it becomes its primary material. By placing her portrait at different ages side by side, Ferrer makes visible the gradual, almost imperceptible nature of change. Her work asks us to consider how we perceive ourselves across time and how identity persists precisely because of our continual transformation. (Ferran Barenblit)

Douglas Gordon’s work is driven by a desire to probe the fissures within representations of reality, searching for what may have escaped our perception. In Left Is Right and Right Is Wrong and Left Is Wrong and Right Is Right, he uses repetition, mirroring, and temporal disruption to destabilize an apparently simple action. Images of hands and feet moving, pausing, or crossing over each other are projected from two different perspectives simultaneously. What is usually seen as a straightforward movement becomes hesitant and ambiguous. Gordon is interested in the way perception constructs continuity by filling gaps and resolving contradictions almost automatically. He interrupts this reflex to expose the fragility of what we see. His use of repetition gradually turns the ordinary gesture into something strange, opening a gap between action and image, body and representation, certainty and doubt. (Ferran Barenblit)

In Corredor suspendido II, Cristina Iglesias brings sculpture and architecture together to transform the passage of a corridor into an artistic experience. Composed of suspended metal planes, the corridor appears to float, unsettling our sense of gravity, enclosure, and orientation. As viewers move through the structure, each step becomes part of the work—the sounds and rhythm of bodily movement heighten awareness of the space and the duration of the experience. Iglesias often constructs environments that function as thresholds between the interior and the exterior, openness and containment, material presence and atmosphere. The work is not simply a form to be contemplated, but a space to be traversed—the time that we need to walk from one end to the other is claimed as the time of experiencing art. Perception unfolds through movement and traversal becomes an act of attention. (Ferran Barenblit)

When I Am Pregnant expresses Anish Kapoor’s sustained interest in presence and absence and in forms that seem to emerge from the exhibition space itself. Rather than presenting a separate object, the work protrudes from the gallery wall as if the architecture was slowly being affected by an interior pressure or hidden volume. The effect is deliberately ambiguous. The work suggests a body, a swelling, or something on the verge of becoming visible. Its title reinforces this uncertainty, with its association to gestation that at the same time resists a symbolic reading. The use of monochrome is also important as it reinforces the role of the viewer. As in much of Kapoor’s work, meaning begins with observation. The viewer perceives a disturbance to the wall and only afterwards interprets the work. When I Am Pregnant turns perception into an encounter with emergence and ambiguity. (Ferran Barenblit)

Ernesto Neto’s Globulocell engages the viewer through proximity, scale, and bodily awareness. Formed by translucent textile membranes, the work creates an experience where vision and perceived touch are closely intertwined. The structures are elastic and hang in the space to form a tangible yet fragile presence, responsive to air currents and bodies moving around it. Rather than inviting full immersion, the work operates through copresence: We perceive the weight of the volumes, the tension of the material, the way the forms occupy and modulate the surrounding space. Neto’s practice shares a relation with the Brazilian concrete and neo-concrete art movements, particularly with artists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica for whom the body was a central site of perception and knowledge. Globulocell is thus not simply looked at; it is physically negotiated. Our own presence becomes part of the work. Perception emerges here as an embodied form of attention. (Ferran Barenblit)

Tobias Rehberger’s work often blurs the boundaries between art, design, architecture, and everyday life. Arbeitend consists of a lamp that is connected to the artist’s studio: whenever Rehberger or someone from his team is working there it lights up; the rest of the time it remains switched off. A simple functional object thus becomes an indicator of remote activity, linking the exhibition space to another place and another rhythm. The work makes labor visible without revealing what that labor consists of, reducing artistic production to a binary signal of on/off, working/not working. With characteristic irony, Rehberger reveals what the art world prefers to leave implicit: The fact that art is also labor, structured by schedules, routines, collaborators, and periods of inactivity. Perception here is intertwined with absence—what we see is merely a sign of something taking place elsewhere or not at all. (Ferran Barenblit)

Maya Rikli waits until the time is right to begin. The materials she works with need time: they have to grow, bloom and slowly dry in the warmth of the sun; they have to develop their structure and subtle, lasting color. The flowers and plants Rikli needs are cut, gathered and selected, whether in nearby Alsace or in the Andalusian landscape that, alongside Basel, has at times become a home for her.
When Rikli talks about her work, she speaks of nuances: of the grounds that materials such as Icelandic moss form on the supports, of the gradations of color that emerge as lavender mingles with nipplewort or quaking grass and of the volumes created by delicate structures and the plants’ dense calyxes.
“Draftswoman” seems a fitting term for an artist who attended the Schools of Design in Basel and Zurich in the late 1970s and has since participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions with widely varying bodies of work. Rikli draws idiosyncratic landscape portraits that speak of growth, transience and moments of pause, as well as the desire to preserve something that would otherwise disappear. Created for this exhibition, the work is Rikli’s largest to date and extends an invitation: to sink into a preserved summer and its lingering resonance, to let oneself fall into it. Sonido. (Ines Goldbach)

The work of Giacomo Santiago Rogado calls attention to the act of painting itself. Colors, forms, and structures unfold freely across the wall on a large scale, challenging our own ways of seeing. What we see remains a reflection of our own perception and interpretation, playing with the eye and altering our sense of space. Colors stand in clear contrast to the wall yet still seem to belong there, almost as if they were figures in their own right. The longer we look, the more forms begin to emerge, giving rise to poetic associations.
At the same time, Rogado connects the process of painting with the visible passage of time involved in its creation. The surrounding structure creates a three-dimensional frame within which the painting can expand and complete itself. Rogado works with perspective as well as with the inherent logic of paint: its distribution, accumulation and movement become active elements in the formation of the image, as surface gradually transforms into space. The resulting forms are less finished outcomes than visible traces of a process. (Ida Biegel)

We’ve all been there: you reach for your phone to capture something around you, only to open your photo gallery and find blurry, out-of-focus images you didn’t even realise you’d taken—often showing the very hand that accidentally triggered the camera. Most people immediately delete these unintended images with their reddish gradients. Hagar Schmidhalter takes them as the starting point for a series that she has expanded for this exhibition.
In the works presented here, Untitled (Hand 28–36), the camera’s conventional role as a tool for documenting the visible world is disrupted: the distance between camera and subject disappears. The camera remains in direct contact with the body, recording not only what is in front of the lens but also the touch between hand and camera that produces the image. Seeing and touching converge, while in the abstract image the hand refers back to itself as pictorial motif, instrument and sensory organ at once. (Martina Stähli)

In Soledad Sevilla’s work, the language of painting and of installation are closely related. Fons et Origo occupies a central place in her practice, transforming perception into a sensory and spatial experience. Drawing on the architecture and acoustics of the Alhambra, the unique Islamic palace located in Granada, and using minimal elements like water, light, and thread, she has constructed an environment suspended between physical presence and evocation. The reflection of a woven grid of tense, vertical threads on the still surface of a pool is continually altered by a falling drop of water. This simple gesture introduces the element of time; the work is never fixed but constantly renewed. Similarly, reflection becomes not a duplicate of reality but a temporary image. Fons et Origo invites us to attend to that instant, in which what we see depends on a minimal disturbance, a vibration of the world. (Ferran Barenblit)

Rémy Zaugg’s works often sound like instructions: prompts to act or behave in a certain way. And yet something always leaves the instruction itself suspended, somehow unresolved. These sentences—or perhaps we should call them sentence fragments—often appear in series, as though the instruction were spreading through the space like an echo. It is no coincidence that, alongside art theory, writing, painting and sculpture, Zaugg also engaged extensively with architecture and frequently collaborated directly with architects.
Including Zaugg’s works in the exhibition Senses Enchanted makes sense on several levels. Throughout his life, the internationally renowned artist, who lived and worked in the Basel region, addressed questions of perception through a radical reduction of visual and linguistic means: What do we see, how do we see and what are we able to see? Using the same typeface throughout (Univers in small caps), he placed words and short texts in varying shades at the center of monochrome surfaces that fill the entire picture plane. There is almost no escaping them visually: the contrasts and shimmering interplay of adjacent colors draw us insistently into the image.
Seeing with the body and at the same time with the intellect is central to Rémy Zaugg’s work: as we read, we look and vice versa. Questions that might otherwise remain theoretical become something we experience directly through the act of seeing. And despite the seriousness of his practice, something else always seems to resonate: a subtle note of enigmatic irony. Look, I am blind, look. Who is it that sees, and who is blind? What do we ourselves allow to be seen, and when do we choose to look away instead? (Ines Goldbach)