For Director Elena Filipovic, the Kunstmuseum Basel Is a ‘Spaceship’ Carrying Us into the Future


Every time curator Elena Filipovic opens an exhibition, she convenes the establishment’s total workers, together with its guards and store cashiers, to take part in an in-depth dialogue with the featured artist. I bought to witness this in 2022, when Filipovic, then the director of the Kunsthalle Basel, led a walk-through of Berenice Olmedo’s latest hanging sculptures, product of wriggling prosthetic-like limbs. Filipovic wished her workers to satisfy the younger artist and urged them to ask her questions.

It’s this distinctive perspective and method to curating and establishment constructing that has made Filipovic considered one of at the moment’s most intently watched curators. After almost 10 years of operating the non-collecting, contemporary-focused Kunsthalle, she launched into a brand new journey two months in the past, turning into the director of the storied Seventeenth-century Kunstmuseum Basel. A baby of immigrants who grew up in Southern California’s Inland Empire, she remains to be considerably of an outsider in Basel; she is the primary non-European and solely the second girl to guide the Kunstmuseum, the holdings of which span from the fifteenth century to at the moment.

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A smiling woman in a white jacket and blue pants standing beside a staircase.

“I’d prefer to suppose I convey the very best of each worlds with me,” Filipovic just lately advised ARTnews of her upbringing within the US and her adopted house of Europe, the place she in 1998. Throughout her tenure on the Kunsthalle, she organized greater than 60 exhibitions, together with acclaimed ones for artists like Michael Armitage, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Yngve Holen, Anne Imhof, and Tiona Nekkia McClodden. In 2022, she organized the Croatian Pavilion at that yr’s Venice Biennale, and, previous to shifting to Basel, she was senior curator at Wiels in Brussels, from 2009 to 2014, and he or she co-curated, with Adam Szymczk, the 2008 Berlin Biennale.

MoMA PS1 director Connie Butler as soon as known as Filipovic a “visionary,” including that she had “among the finest curatorial packages anyplace.” When she was chosen to guide the Kunstmuseum, the choice committee’s president Felix Uhlmann mentioned, on the time, that Filipovic’s “infectious enthusiasm for the complete spectrum of artwork historical past, and her potential to encourage folks for artwork” is in the end what made the committee select her for the place.

Set up view of Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s 2023 solo exhibition on the Kunsthalle Basel, curated by Elena Filipovic.

picture: Philipp Hänger / Kunsthalle Basel

Filipovic is a conciliatory determine, whose new mandate consists of strengthening the museum’s international standing and ushering it into the long run, at a time when artwork establishments around the globe attempt for extra inclusivity, each by way of their public and within the telling of artwork historical past. With the assist of the establishment, Filipovic mentioned she can also be “pushing to go additional and sooner.”

She added, “It’s vital that all of us do not forget that this shouldn’t be a cemetery of gorgeous lifeless issues, however a spaceship. It ought to carry us into the long run.”

A museum spaceship might look like an idea out of step with a Seventeenth-century establishment, housing over 300,000 works spanning seven centuries. However Filipovic argues the Kunstmuseum was radical for its day: it turned the world’s first public museum in 1661.

The query that animates her imaginative and prescient for the Kunstmuseum, which will even endure a renovation starting in 2027, she mentioned, is “How are you going to run a really previous museum that however has inscribed in its DNA the concept that it ought to nonetheless converse to generations sooner or later?”

The exterior of a white-brick museum building on a corner with tram tracks passing by.

Exterior view of the Kunstmuseum Basel’s predominant constructing, 2022.

Picture Mark Niedermann

A technique Filipovic hopes to hold the establishment ahead is by exhibiting the work of underrepresented artists extra regularly, together with in a deliberate rehang starting this summer time within the museum’s latest constructing that pulls on an expansive acquisition technique that she has already applied, including items by Helen Frankenthaler, Julie Mehretu, and Cameron Rowland. “Each acquisition turns into a manifesto of types, and an opportunity to rethink what legacy we go away for future generations,” she mentioned.

Filipovic just lately commissioned Louis Lawler to create a piece for the brand new constructing’s lobby. Lawler’s images can appear to swipe throughout, distort, or blur canonic artworks, questioning the programs and establishments which have lionized and valued them. Lawler’s work “turns into a commentary on what has been glorified within the museum and the way we’re taking steps to really take a look at that,” she mentioned.

However, Filipovic additionally desires to proceed to activate works already within the assortment, together with a few of the museum’s most famed ones, by pursuing and displaying new analysis, which can also be already underway, about their historic contexts, topics, and provenance. A part of her purpose is to indicate how centuries-old work stays acutely related to the questions we face at the moment. Take Hans Holbein the Youthful’s The Lifeless Christ within the Tomb (1521–22), a life-size and considerably jarring depiction of the deceased Jesus within the early phases of decay. The work, she mentioned, “speaks to our current at a time of disaster and conflict and loss of life. Our society has had a few of the similar issues and questions and but resilience has carried us via.”

A very horizontal, life-size painting of the body of the dead Christ with a very pointed chin and in the early stages of decay.

Hans Holbein the Youthful, The Lifeless Christ within the Tomb, 1521–22.

Kunstmuseum Basel – Jonas Hängg

And in sustaining a everlasting assortment that dates again almost 400 years, Filipovic will even should navigate the Kunstmuseum via delicate conditions like restitution claims, a number of of which have come up prior to now few years. These embrace a 2020 settlement for an undisclosed sum over the museum’s buy of 200 works as soon as owned by a Jewish collector from a 1933 public sale, and an ongoing declare over a Henri Rousseau portray a collector offered to assist herself whereas in exile in Switzerland after fleeing Nazi persecution in Germany. (In an announcement in January, the museum mentioned it’s negotiating a “simply and honest resolution” with the latter collector’s heirs.)

Whereas Filipovic had not been concerned in these restitution claims, she spoke extra broadly about how she plans to handle such claims going ahead, together with persevering with to assist intensive, proactive analysis into the provenance of artworks within the assortment, begun by her predecessor Josef Helfenstein, after which discovering methods to share that data with the general public.

“As soon as that the analysis has been performed, I feel it’s the duty of the museum—and it has already been dedicated to this earlier than my time, and it’ll proceed to throughout my time—to render this data accessible,” she mentioned.

Painting of four black men in green suits with white suits against a green background.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s A End result (2016) was acquired by the Kunstmuseum Basel in 2017.

Kunstmuseum Basel – Jonas Haengg

With regards to the gathering rehang, an train that has turn into one thing of a worldwide pattern of late, Filipovic mentioned the initiative is much less about following the lead of different establishments than it’s a “feeling that there are such a lot of tales that can be advised,” she mentioned. “By rehanging the gathering, you’re demanding that the general public discover. That each juxtaposition may provoke a brand new studying of every work.”

Her purpose, she continued, is “to not give the general public the sensation that [the collection] has been arrange and is sleeping [nor] that these truths are inalienable. It isn’t so.”

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