ART CITIES:Basel-Shuang Li
Through videos, performances, and installations, Shuang Li examines how digital technologies shape relationships, bodies, and desire. She investigates the entanglements of humans, media, and the infrastructures of the digital world. In her first institutional solo exhibition in Europe, Li premieres her most ambitious film installation to date: She engages with extreme weather phenomena and the practice of storm chasing, the targeted pursuit and observation of severe weather, especially thunderstorms, tornadoes, and hurricanes. Situated within global networks where climate volatility, algorithmic systems, and capitalist extraction operate across borders, Li approaches storm chasing as a powerful metaphor for navigating the swirling forces that define life in the digital age.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Kunsthalle Basel Archive
In the flat expanse of the American Midwest, storm chasers track severe weather across vast highways. Guided by satellite forecasts and radar displays, they drive endlessly through uncertainty, pursuing physical weather phenomena that are simultaneously menacingly close and completely uncontrollable. In “Alliance”, her debut institutional solo exhibition in Europe at Kunsthalle Basel, Chinese artist Shuang Li takes this relentless pursuit of tornadoes as a point of departure, transforming the physical reality of severe weather into a haunting metaphor for the swirling, algorithmic infrastructures and digital forces that govern modern life. For Li, the extreme storm is far more than an ecological threat or meteorological event; it is an atmosphere that defines contemporary digital culture. In an age shaped by constant media circulation, endless livestreams, and hyper-accelerated data flows, public attention operates under conditions of severe leveling. Digital media infrastructures operate much like tornadoes forming over flat terrain: everything appears equally accessible, immediate, and horizontal, until users are abruptly pulled into a violent vertical vortex of attention, data, and obsession. In this environment, information recirculates endlessly—past controversies, archived images, and digital debris are constantly stirred up, leaving time itself trapped in a tornado loop. Spread across five distinct spatial stages that mirror a road trip into the eye of the storm, Alliance constructs an immersive physical architecture for this contemporary condition, guiding museum visitors along an unstable path where movement itself becomes the primary form of orientation.
The exhibition’s journey begins in the first gallery with “The Middle of the Day That Starts It All” (2026), an installation that sets the expedition in motion. Thirteen TV screens, suspended within an industrial architectural framework of metal structures resembling rural roadway guardrails, play relentless, looping video fragments. Functioning like atmospheric B-roll footage from a road movie, passing landscapes glimpsed from a moving vehicle are digitally amplified to the edge of dissolution. Before these images can ever fully stabilize, they flicker and dissolve. The surrounding metal framework lifts off the ground and winds through the room, buckling under an unseen force as though it can no longer withstand the velocity of the movement itself. Here, at the onset of the chase, the visual medium reveals its inherent instability under speed.
Transitioning into the adjacent galleries, this rapid forward momentum gives way to large-scale, billboard-like works: “Fire at Will’ and “Stolen from My Eyes” (both 2026). Utilizing shifting lenticular prints framed like oversized roadside signage, these pieces layer video stills, private archives, and meteorological mapping into a state of continual displacement. As the viewer walks past, images refuse to maintain a fixed beginning or end: weather fronts morph into body bruises, flickering highway lights dissolve into handwritten notes, and scientific weather maps merge with personal memory. Nearby, “Interlude” (2026) spreads across the floor like detached digital pixels, punctuated by resin sculptures modeled on meteorological wind barbs. Within these clear resin forms, everyday objects sit preserved like condensation droplets gathering on smooth surfaces moments before a cloudburst.
Before reaching the exhibition’s overwhelming climax, the frantic pace of digital circulation briefly decelerates. In “With a Trunk of Ammunition Too” (2024), the exhibition yields to a temporary suspension, shifting into a deeply intimate register. Flickering Morse-code lights illuminate the darkened space, translating a letter Li wrote to her mother into a coded, pulsating rhythm. Accompanied by Li’s own voice floating quietly through the gallery, this installation slows the room’s momentum down to a delicate pulse, as though gently drawing the dormant energy of the surrounding vortex back into focus before the final surge.
The architectural and narrative intensity reaches its zenith in the final gallery space, where towering steel structures swirl upward toward the high ceilings as if the wind itself had taken on solid, heavy materiality. Center stage belongs to “Alliance (Heart Loop)” (2026), Shuang Li’s most ambitious multi-channel video installation to date.
Blending the visual vocabularies of DIY road trips, observational documentaries, and digital livestreams, the film follows multiple figures on their individual storm-chasing journeys through open fields, gas stations, and desolate industrial strips. Crucially, all three main characters are portrayed by the exact same “actress”: a synthetic sex doll.
Having lost human agency to the pervasive storms of algorithmic control, these artificial avatars embark on a surreal pilgrimage toward the tornado. The sex doll—a figure historically defined by passive utility and manufactured desire—becomes a poignant surrogate for the contemporary digital subject, whose decisions are constantly shaped and automated within circulating data streams. Driven by a collective desire to enter the eye of the storm, their quest is not an act of self-destruction, but a desperate search for transformation: a final attempt to step into the center of the force and reclaim what was taken away by the wind in the first place.
Throughout “Alliance”, Shuang Li translates the dynamics of modern media environments—their horizontal flattening and sudden vertical suction, their endless drift and intense compression—into a tactile, highly spatial art experience. In a world where information flows continuously organize perception and individual choice feels increasingly pre-scripted by circulating data systems, Li’s exhibition avoids simple technophobia.
“Alliance” proposes that finding orientation in the digital age requires embracing the movement of the storm. To enter the eye of the tornado is to accept a state of total surrender—to allow oneself to be swept up in the maelstrom so that, on the other side of loss, a new form of human agency might finally become possible.
Photo: Exhibition view, “Shuang Li: Alliance”, Kunsthalle Basel – Basel, 2026, Courtesy the artist and Kunsthalle Basel, Photo: Philipp Hänger / Kunsthalle Basel
Info: Curator: Mohamed Almusibli, Kunsthalle Basel, Steinenberg 7, Basel, Switzerland, Duration: 12/6-13/9/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 16:00-22:00, https://kunsthallebasel.ch/
