
Unlimited Basel | Atelier Van Lieshout | THE VOYAGE – A MARCH TO UTOPIA
Foire 16 June 2025 - 22 June 2025Address : Art Basel Unlimited Messeplatz 10 Basel
«This work is about a voyage to utopia, to an unknown place—a better place—a garden of Eden—a place where we hope to find happiness, where we dream of creating a new world, a parallel or better world.»
— Joep van Lieshout
Atelier Van Lieshout, Jousse Entreprise, Paris, Galerie Krinzinger Vienna, OMR Mexico City, Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam present The Voyage – A March to Utopia for Art Basel Unlimited, a monumental installation that traces humanity’s endless search for a better place. Part sculpture, part caravan, part fever dream, this ambitious parade of machines, monuments, and memories captures the drive to move forward at all costs, even when the destination remains uncertain.
Led by The Leader—a discarded scooter, lovingly restored into a symbol of resilience and hope—The Voyage unfolds as an infinite procession, a ‘March to Utopia.’ Along the way, it collects everything and everyone: improvised medical units, surreal survival equipment, memorials to fallen heroes, and bundles of precious or questionable cargo. Progression and deterioration walk hand in hand; survival and hope blur.
Comprising endless objects, sculptures, and machines, The Voyage embodies humanity’s compulsive, incessant blind pursuit of happiness. The procession is joyful yet ominous, a living monument to our yearning for freedom, autonomy, and meaning. It questions what we carry forward, what we abandon, and what ultimately defines survival: the will to go on.
The parade gathers the cargo of our ideals: weaponized wheelchairs equipped with beer/snacks/ashtrays, dream machines offering psychic escape, mobile surgical theaters engineered to optimize everyday materials. Tenderness and brutality coexist within each adapted device. This is a work born of pressure and possibility – where mobility becomes necessity, invention becomes care, and inclusion an act of survival.
Image : Atelier Van Lieshout, Sad Wheelchair, 2021
Vernissage : 16/06/2025 12:00 am
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