ART CITIES:Basel-Chloe Wise
Chloe Wise’s work is grounded in an interest in the history of portraiture and examines the multiple channels through which the Self is constructed, particularly the interweaving of consumption and image-making. With humor and irony, she references canonical art-historical tableaux while probing projected desires surrounding food, femininity, and the body. Her meticulously hand-painted casts of food, assembled into uncanny sculptural forms, sustain a tension between permanence and perishability, fiction and reality. Drawing on references from advertising, fashion, taboo, and multinational branding, Wise both parodies contemporary consumptive habits and exposes the ways in which the body is framed, stylized, and rendered excessive within systems of visual culture.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger | KBH.G Archive
“Extrasensory” marks Chloe Wise’s first major institutional exhibition in Switzerland and presents the artist’s most ambitious film project to date. Conceived as a large-scale immersive environment, the exhibition centers on a newly commissioned multichannel installation that expands Wise’s longstanding exploration of belief, perception, and the cultural production of meaning.
At the heart of the exhibition is “PsyFi*” a three-channel cinematic work that investigates how different cultures and historical periods have sought to understand encounters with the unknown. Moving fluidly between religious mysticism, folklore, popular culture, and contemporary accounts of extraterrestrial phenomena, the film traces striking continuities in the ways humans describe experiences that exceed conventional understanding. Wise draws compelling parallels between angelic visitations, visions of luminous beings, telepathic communication, ecstatic states, and present-day narratives surrounding UFOs and non-human intelligence. While the interpretive frameworks surrounding such phenomena have evolved alongside shifts in religion, science, and technology, the underlying experiences themselves appear remarkably persistent across time.
Rather than attempting to confirm or disprove any particular belief system, Wise’s inquiry focuses on the mechanisms through which these experiences are narrated, visualized, and collectively understood. Her work examines how cultural frameworks, symbolic languages, and inherited imagery shape perception itself. Within this context, figures associated with angels, extraterrestrials, supernatural entities, and technological apparitions emerge as unstable and mutable constructs—oscillating between archetype, projection, and collective fantasy. In doing so, “PsyFi*: foregrounds the limitations of language and representation when confronted with the ineffable.
Written and directed by Chloe Wise and produced by GUMMY Films, the film represents the artist’s most expansive cinematic undertaking to date. The project brings together an interdisciplinary network of collaborators spanning film, music, performance, fashion, and visual art, resulting in a work that blurs the boundaries between narrative cinema, installation, and contemporary art.
Presented within a fully immersive three-channel environment, the film envelops viewers in a continuously shifting visual and sonic landscape. Drawing on familiar aesthetic vocabularies—from science-fiction cinema and New Age visual culture to religious iconography and mass-media spectacle—“Extrasensory” reveals how perception is conditioned by the cultural images through which reality is interpreted. The exhibition becomes a meditation on belief as both a personal experience and a collective construction.
Within the film, seven archetypal characters appear as embodiments of mystical, metaphysical, and transcendent phenomena. Performed by a cast that brings together internationally recognized actors, musicians, and artists—including American rapper JT; actors Ben Ahlers, Delaney Rowe, Michael Buscemi, Lucas Bravo, and Bianca Leigh; and visual artists Miles Greenberg, Moses Sumney, Martine Syms, and Martine Gutierrez—the protagonists inhabit deliberately heightened and stylized roles. Their performances blur distinctions between spiritual conviction, cultural mythology, ideological projection, and contemporary celebrity. Echoing the visual language of Wise’s paintings while drawing heavily on the aesthetics of late twentieth-century film and television, “PsyFi*” constructs a seductive yet unsettling atmosphere that underscores the exhibition’s broader engagement with persuasion, fantasy, spectacle, and the circulation of images in contemporary culture.
The exhibition extends beyond the cinematic installation into a sequence of carefully constructed environments that deepen and expand its conceptual framework. Visitors first enter a space resembling an esoteric roadside gift shop, where religious artifacts and UFO memorabilia coexist in unexpected harmony. Rosaries, figurines, tarot decks, devotional objects, souvenirs, and extraterrestrial paraphernalia are displayed side by side, collapsing distinctions between faith, commerce, popular culture, and everyday ritual. Through this juxtaposition, Wise highlights the ways belief systems are commodified, circulated, and absorbed into collective visual culture.
A second environment evokes, simultaneously, a backstage dressing room, a place of worship, and the interior of a spacecraft. Oscillating between intimacy and estrangement, familiarity and speculation, the space functions as a liminal zone where identities, narratives, and systems of belief are continuously performed and transformed. Together, these immersive settings frame belief not as a fixed doctrine or stable truth, but as a lived and evolving experience shaped through objects, repetition, images, and cultural transmission.
Through its synthesis of cinema, installation, performance, and visual culture, the exhibition invites viewers to consider how the unknown is continuously reimagined through the stories societies tell themselves. The exhibition proposes that while the forms through which mystery is understood may change, the human desire to seek meaning beyond the visible world remains enduring and universal.
Photo: Chloe Wise, Extrasensory, Exhibition view, Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger, 2026, Photo: Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger | KBH.G
Info: Curator: Samuel Leuenberger, Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger KBH.G, Spitalstrasse 18, Basel, Switzerland, Duration: 12/6-6/9/2026, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.kbhg.ch/
