26.10. - 30.10.2011
Opening: 25.10.2011, 7pm

Opening hours, 26.10. - 30.10.2011:
2pm - 6pm; guided tours daily at 4pm


Pioneers are those who advance into unknown territory, scout it out and secure it for the troops that follow them. They are sent forth when resources become scarce and new territory must be acquired. The glorious days of the pioneers that blossomed in the mid-19th century in the American West have been recounted in literature and film. In the history of art, avant-garde artists are also described as pioneers, who have conquered new forms and concepts for the artists of generations to come. Since the 1960s, artists have proven themselves to be pioneers in yet another area: urban development. They were the forerunners of subsequent gentrification and, among other things, contributed to the social transformation of quarters such as Brooklyn Heights or Williamsburg in New York, Dalston (Hackney) in London or Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin. Today urban planners try to benefit from such spontaneous developments and send in cultural producers prior to their planned restructuring.

The Kunstfreilager is likewise a city quarter in progress, and as a gigantic construction site shifts its structures on a daily basis. Various urban and social requirements are integrated into the concept of the complex under the direction of the Christoph Merian Foundation. At the moment it is hard to imagine how the premises will look, with an art university, apartment buildings and institutions. As one of the first to work at the complex, we benefit from this constantly changing location and the “Things to Come” – as Beat Brogle put it in 2006 with his neon light work on the Transitlager building opposite Oslostrasse. (1) Pioneers to the Falls reacts to this inspiring time of transformation with artistic works outside of the protection of the exhibition space, on territory that is yet to be defined.

The works of Jérémie Gindre, Aloïs Godinat, Markus Müller, Mandla Reuter and Valentina Stieger installed on the premises surrounding OSLO10 address the visions, uncertainties and desires that accompany the construction of the complex. The spirit of change will soon be followed by clear structures; the mutability of the postindustrial area will vanish. Pioneers to the Falls ironically invokes the waterfall, as a romantic ideal and metaphor for adventure and danger – right now there are at most thin trickles of construction site run-off. The transience of ideals, as well as the reality that makes itself felt after the first victory are addressed by the works with different settings, gestures and materials that are both ephemeral and temporary.

The installations and sculptures show the artists’ approaches to the complex, which discloses both its past and its future only through close observation and exploration while strolling through the areal – as a former bonded warehouse under tight security in a microcosm serving as an important transit point for Basel as an economic hub, and where now the constructions of the building projects have become quite apparent. The works set alternative signs and spatial markings for the Kunstfreilager, and in doing so help to determine the first chapter of its history to come.


_{(1) Part of the project 5 Parks by Markus Schaub, 2006, realized at the Dreispitzareal (Competition for Art in Public Space, Kunstkredit Basel-Stadt, 2004).}



Aloïs Godinat
Aloïs Godinat’s artistic practice is based on the gesture of minimal intervention: made of simple materials such as paper, cardboard, rubber or wood, his works subtly combine and rearticulate the spatial context in which they are situated. Integral to his work are details such as color selection and the structure of his materials as well as revealing the processes of transformation and fugitiveness.
Likewise, Godinat reacts to the specific context in his new works: at the former weigh house, he installed an audio work including music he composed himself. The music creates a simple sound volume with ancient instruments such as flute and tambourine, an improvisation that seeks a clear melody between signal sounds and abstract harmonies. Nearby, Godinat arranged sculptures made of metal rods with attached pieces of paper addressing the procedures for occupation or measurement of lots. The paper pieces were cut from invitation cards and serve as rudimentary excerpts of cultural information that can no longer be deciphered. In addition, Godinat created a series of cardboard objects on which his sound poem Aï is stamped in ink. Distributed across the area, the fragile sculptures comprise a composition that unites language, music and space. Despite the temporary nature of the objects, which almost seamlessly blend into the complex that is otherwise scattered with building materials, the artist creates a resistant intervention through formal repetition.

Jérémie Gindre
With his installations and arrangements of diverse materials, Jérémie Gindre creates associative contexts and narrative lines. With the various works he has installed throughout the Zollfreilager, he casts a net of narrative fragments and trails that create connections between the history of the American pioneers and the current transformation at the Dreispitzareal, between urban visions and left fireplaces.
The artist carries found ‘stones’ from the area into the exhibition space, combining them with an excerpt and a map of the Missouri Falls from the expedition diaries of Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who in 1804 led the United States’ first transcontinental expedition to the Pacific coast and back. The goal of the expedition was to find a navigable water route to the Pacific Ocean and to create a powerful nation between the Atlantic and Pacific. With a large geological sketch of New York City installed at the complex like a billboard for a building project, Gindre not only refers to the (vertical) construction of the metropolis, but to visionary ideas in general, which thanks only to a solid foundation may be realized. With Le Présent Jérémie Gindre also makes a tongue-in-cheek reference to the pioneers of the past and the present who prepared their meals over an open fire. The fire pit is part of a series of works that Gindre began in 2005 on the Älggi Alp, which is the measured geological center of Switzerland.

Markus Müller
Markus Müller develops sculptures that reference domestic objects or museum presentation furniture, whose real forms and materials he enhances. Simple building materials such as roof batten or plywood are painted to resemble other more valuable wooden or stone structures. Müller transforms tables, frames and pedestals into dramatized constructions and surfaces so that they behave like foreign objects in the space. The hyperreality of materials and plasticity may also be observed outdoors in one of his more recent works, Scusi Brancusi (2009) – a gigantic antenna made of lacquered steel that has been permanently installed in front of the Jacob Burckhardt-Haus in Basel.
For chip carving (2011) Müller intervened with the building façade of Agility Logistics AG in Oslostrasse: a dynamic line is deftly carved into the plastering. The sculptural gesture of the cut in an existing structure redefines the location. Müller carefully analyses the materiality of the surface and uses the façade as an urban ingredient for his own work. In doing so he reflects on the style of ‘Kunst am Bau’-projects from the 1950s, which often oscillated between a desire for decoration and unhesitating generosity. Similar to the concetto spaziale by avant-garde artist Lucio Fontana, who, in his quest for a dynamic art form, perforated canvases with cuts and holes to give two-dimensional works a passive/aggressive plasticity, Müller transforms the uninspired façade into a sculptural image that signals the pending transformation of the complex.

Mandla Reuter
In addition to their concrete sculptural characteristics, Mandla Reuter’s works often function as links that create structures for possible narratives. These are usually left open by Reuter, so that the works can be read from very different perspectives. They are made manifest through interventions in architectural situations or through shifts in meaning: Thereby, the transformed parameters start to evoke own images.
Thus Reuter blocks the entrance of an exhibition space with a rock, forcing the public to take a new route to enter the building (Boros Collection, Berlin, 2009) or he transfers part of a plot of land he owns in Los Angeles to an art museum in Holland (De Vleeshal, Middelburg, 2011).
The ongoing restructuring at Kunstfreilager, where exterior and interior spaces change almost daily, where paths are blocked and floors torn out, form the starting point for Reuter’s current work: a hole dug out on the grounds. Only this hole has been dug neither according to a specific (future or construction) plan nor for a specific reason. With the title Progress and Decline (2011) Reuter provokes images and ideas of possible projects or constructions that could be served by the hole, whose failure, however, seems implied from the onset, when at the end of the exhibition the hole is refilled, the site returned to its original state.
In contrast to Land Art artists such as Michael Heizer, Reuter is less interested in sculpturally treating a landscape than in exploring their imaginary and real potential.

Valentina Stieger
Abstraction, materiality and situation. This triad comprise a recurring artistic interest present in the works of Valentina Stieger and which is also evident in her contribution to Pioneers to the Falls.
Using the (hiking)stick as a basic element of archaic pioneer achievements, Stieger delineates the cultural scope of the Dreispitzareal with a series of abstract and simple objects (wooden sticks) by leaning them against existing architectures. In the context of the exhibition, their presence may be seen as the self-disclosure of the avant-garde. Yet the presumed specificity of this reveal is not fulfilled by the surface characteristics of the sticks. Instead, cork, marble and holographic foil imitate foreign surfaces and values, thus pointing away from such an act of self-disclosure. The pioneer achievement of the avant-garde is confronted by its opposite: kitsch, in the form of illusion and counterfeit.
With her discreet and at times playful arrangements, Stieger succeeds in creating unstable situations in open space, where opposites collapse into one another, where the evidence of value blurs. In such a way, the fading modernist dialectic of avant-garde and kitsch – or vanguard and rear guard – newly synthesizes into a multifaceted reflection on the ambiguity and versatility of the pioneering and its status, both in art as well as in the particular context of urban space development.