ART CITIES: Basel-Steve McQueen

Recognized internationally as one of the most important artists of his generation, Steve McQueen is an artist and filmmaker whose work explores universal themes, often addressing painful and challenging histories and exposes the fragility of the human condition. Over the last 25 years Steve McQueen has created some of the most innovative works of moving image designed for gallery spaces. He has also directed four critically acclaimed feature films, including the Academy Award-winning “12 Years a Slave”.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: The Laurenz Foundation Archive

At once immersive and immaterial, Steve McQueen’s “Bass” stands among the artist’s most abstract and sensorially charged works to date. The temporary intervention—co-commissioned by the Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel, and Dia Art Foundation in New York—marks a striking evolution in McQueen’s ongoing exploration of perception, memory, and the body’s relationship to sound and light. In “Bass”, deep frequencies swell and recede through space, alternately thunderous and subdued, forming a soundscape that suggests both rhythm and breath. Bright, fleeting riffs meet muffled vibrations as Schaulager’s vast interior becomes a resonant chamber—bathed in a continuum of colored light that drifts imperceptibly from deep red to ultraviolet. More than a thousand LED tubes, installed in place of the museum’s regular ceiling lights, traverse the building’s five levels like luminous contour lines, transforming architecture into atmosphere. At the installation’s heart, a column of suspended subwoofers and speakers hangs weightlessly, a paradox of mass and levity that embodies the work’s tension between the physical and the ethereal.

When McQueen first conceived “Bass” in 2022, the artist was invited by the Laurenz Foundation and Dia Art Foundation to produce a new project for Dia Beacon—a former Nabisco factory whose cavernous lower level inspired a radical departure from his film-based practice. Encountering the site’s subterranean stillness, McQueen chose to forgo the moving image altogether, turning instead to the elemental forces of light and sound. The result is a work that seeps, in McQueen’s words, “into every nook and cranny,” interacting with architecture as a living, breathing organism. At the core of “Bass” lies a collaboration with legendary bassist Marcus Miller and an ensemble of four other virtuosos from the Black diaspora: Mamadou Kouyaté, Aston Barrett Jr., Meshell Ndegeocello, and Laura-Simone Martin. In January 2024, the group gathered at Dia Beacon, improvising within the slowly shifting cycle of colored light. Their layered improvisations—bright ngoni patterns, barely plucked electric bass tones, bowed acoustic resonances—were later edited into a three-hour composition that forms the installation’s sonic backbone.

McQueen’s focus on the bass as both instrument and metaphor is deeply intentional. Within Black musical traditions, the bass line grounds and propels, its frequencies felt as much as heard. In “Bass”, those low vibrations become a physical language of resilience and presence—an embodied counterpoint to histories of displacement and erasure. As McQueen has often done, he invokes the legacy of the Black Atlantic: a vast, transoceanic network of movement, survival, and creative rebirth. The work’s original site—the dark, columned hall of Dia Beacon—evoked for McQueen the claustrophobic holds of slave ships, as well as the luminous refuge of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” where invisibility becomes both wound and weapon. At Schaulager, these historical echoes reverberate differently. The installation expands vertically through the museum’s five floors, recalibrated for a space whose immense scale transforms sound into architecture itself. The interplay of vertical and horizontal axes—the soaring atrium and the glowing ceiling grid—renders «Bass»a space of infinite depth, as if the visitor were suspended between sea and sky. The oceanic metaphor becomes literal: soundwaves surge and subside like tides, while light dissolves distinctions of time and perspective.

The thirty-minute chromatic cycle unfolds so gradually that perception falters; the color changes feel more like temperature shifts or emotional tides than visual events. Visitors drift within this continuous flux, untethered from narrative or orientation. There is no fixed vantage point, no beginning or end—only immersion. In this way, “Bass” extends McQueen’s enduring fascination with the somatic power of art: how light, sound, and memory conspire to move us beyond seeing and hearing, into feeling. “Bass” is, ultimately, a meditation on the unseen and the unheard—the histories that vibrate beneath the surface, the resonances that bind architecture, body, and time. By dissolving the boundaries between medium and space, McQueen offers not just an installation but a state of suspension: a sea of sound and light in which we are both adrift and deeply grounded.

Photo: Steve McQueen, Bass, 2024, LED Light and Sound, Courtesy the artist, Co-commissioned work by Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel and Dia Art Foundation, 15 June – 14 December 2025, Schaulager® Münchenstein/Basel (Installation view), Photo: Pati Grabowicz, © Steve McQueen

Info: Curtor: Heidi Naef, The Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel, Ruchfeldstrasse 19, Münchenstein, Switzerland, Duration: 15/6-14/12/2025, Days & Hours: Thu 12:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, https://schaulager.org/