Timur Si-Qin: Mariposita, 2026, presented by the galleries Magician Space and Société at Art Basel 2026 Unlimited. Official description: Mariposita is an immersive sculptural installation comprising a stainless-steel structure and an LED screen. It envisions a fragile biosphere left to its own devices: a delicate tangle of plant life, insects, and organic matter forming an integrated, interdependent whole. Suspended forms and flickering imagery create a dreamlike atmosphere. Referencing ecosystems under threat from human activity, the work functions as a meditative gesture, inviting close attention to the complexity and richness of natural systems. Rather than positioning nature as a backdrop, the installation frames it as an active, guiding presence, emphasizing interconnection. Timur Si-Qin (born 1984 in Berlin) is an artist of German and Mongolian-Chinese descent. He interweaves cultural evolution, cognition, and contemporary philosophy to create art that dissolves boundaries between the natural and the synthetic, the human and non-human. Si-Qin lives and works in New York.

Timur Si-Qin: Mariposita, 2026, presented by the galleries Magician Space and Société at Art Basel 2026 Unlimited. Basel (Switzerland), June 19, 2026.

Mareunrol’s, Bruno Birmanis: Untamed Assembly: Backstage of Utopia / Pavilion of Latvia at Venice Art Biennale 2026. Venice (Italy), May 6, 2026.

Official description:

The pavilion presents a new work by artist duo MAREUNROL’S in dialogue with the archives of Untamed Fashion Assemblies (UFA), a series of experimental events founded by alternative fashion designer Bruno Birmanis in Riga between 1990 and 1999. Organised during a decade of profound political transformation, UFA expanded fashion across visual art, music, and club culture, defying conservative social norms inherited from the Soviet era, and offering an alternative to the commercialised fashion markets in the West.

Linking past and present, the exhibition highlights utopian thinking at moments of transition. It asks how collective imagination, desire, and visibility are produced as political and economic systems shift, and how futures and new forms of togetherness are rehearsed from behind the scenes rather than on the main stage. Rethinking UFA’s legacy, the installation is conceived as a backstage, where the clothing rack becomes a holding device and the architecture of the stories.

Newly digitised footage from Birmanis’ archive traces the threads of travel and bordercrossing, transnational community building, scarcity as the force for creativity and fragile political freedom. Returning to this archive, the pavilion asks what can be gathered today from the utopian visions of these festivals.

Muhannad Shono: Towers of Infinite Horizons, 2026, presented by Athr at Art Basel 2026 Unlimited. Official description: For Art Basel Unlimited, ATHR presents Towers of Infinite Horizons by Muhannad Shono, a 17-metrewide installation housed within a lightweight metal lattice structure. Segments of reclaimed foundry sand form the sculp ture’s dark, granular sur-face, transforming industrial residue into a tactile landscape. By reconfiguring the ritual of ascent into a lateral, bodily traversal, Shono interrogates the vertical logic of towers, historically machines of authority and doctrine, presenting instead a fallen monolith: an attentive, listening structure.
Towers were historically raised to command the horizon of ideas. From watchtowers to transmission spires, they projected signals, ideology, and authority from the high ground of the few to the many below. Height rendered hierarchy visible, enforcing a singular narrative that directed imagination upward toward a fixed source rather than outward toward multiplicity.
The tower lies fractured and suspended within a bespoke lattice scaffolding, held in a state of arrested decay. Neither complete nor erased, it becomes a listening structure, attentive rather than directive. Constructed from reclaimed foundry sand, a material designed to be temporary, the work reverses the logic of casting. Here, the sand is not a means to form, but the form itself: fractured, unstable, and open to continuous transformation.
To “climb” the tower is no longer to rise above the world, but to move laterally through its interior. Like tracing exposed roots or navigating a fallen tree, the body becomes the activating force. Architecture no longer projects ideology; it absorbs interpretation.
For new narratives to emerge, monoliths must fall. In collapse, space opens. When towers fall, they relinquish singular authority and unfold into infinite horizons.

Muhannad Shono: Towers of Infinite Horizons, 2026, presented by Athr at Art Basel 2026 Unlimited. Basel (Switzerland), June 19, 2026.

Claes Oldenburg’s “Gartenschlauch” (Garden Hose) is a large-scale public sculpture created in 1983 by the Swedish-American Pop Art artist Claes Oldenburg (1929–2022) in collaboration with his wife, the Dutch artist Coosje van Bruggen (1942–2009). It stands in Eschholzpark (also called Stühlinger Park) in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany.

The sculpture is an oversized, bright red garden hose with a matching faucet (tap). It features a hose, approximately 84–125 meters (about 276–410 feet) long and 0.5 meters (20 inches) in diameter; and a faucet, roughly 10–11 meters (35 feet) high. Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen‘s Gartenschlauch is made of of steel painted with polyurethane enamel, fabricated in sections at Mannesmannröhren-Werke AG in Mülheim (Ruhr area). Engineers developed a special bending process to curve the 30 hose sections in two directions simultaneously.

The piece loops dramatically across the park, with the giant faucet standing prominently. It is a classic example of Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s style: monumental, playful enlargements of everyday objects that transform public spaces.

The site of Eschholzpark was formerly an allotment garden (Schrebergarten) area that was cleared for a vocational school center and the new park. The sculpture commemorates this history — the garden hose symbolizes a key tool from the vanished gardens. Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s design won Freiburg’s 1980 art competition.

The artwork was installed in April 1983 and inaugurated on May 2, 1983, as “Kunst am Bau” (art in architecture) for the school center. Costs were around 400,000 German marks. This was one of their early joint large-scale projects. Oldenburg was known for Pop Art works that brought ordinary items into public view, making art accessible and site-specific.

The sculpture serves as a playful landmark, popular with children (who climb on parts of it) and visitors. The surrounding park offers lawns, playgrounds, sports facilities, and a stream. Over the years it has faced graffiti and paint wear, leading to occasional maintenance discussions, but it remains a beloved local icon and one of Freiburg’s most significant public artworks. It is part of Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s global series of oversized everyday objects, similar to their giant clothespin, baseball bat, or ice cream cone sculptures.

Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen: Gartenschlauch (Garden Hose). Eschholzpark, Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany), July 18, 2026.

Black Seas – Scores for the Sonic Eye. Anca Benera, Arnold Estefán / Pavilion of Romania at Venice Art Biennale 2026. May 8, 2026.

Official description: Black Seas – Scores for the Sonic Eye listens to the Black Sea as a living archive. Through the work of Anca Benera & Arnold Estefán, the Romanian Pavilion is grounded in sustained research into oceanography and ecology in relation to the Black Sea as one of the world’s key historical and geopolitical crossroads. The installation approaches the sea as a repository of latent material states – sediments and anoxic strata, fossil time and suspended life – through which ecological, historical, and political processes persist and recombine. Sound, moving image, and sculptural elements open a field of listening with the Black Sea. “Fed” by the Danube, the Don, and the Dnieper – fluvial systems that carry sediment as much as memory – the sea’s oxygen-starved depths hold traces of empire, extraction, displacement, and ecological change. Beyond the pavilion, the project extends into the Romanian Institute of Culture and Humanistic Research in Cannaregio, where the Black Sea coast enters relation with the Atlantic Ocean and the Namib Desert through industrial circulation and infrastructural afterlives. Across both sites, the work proposes listening as a method: tuning to asymmetrically distributed forces and to futures held in latency, toward languages of solidarity and repair.