Art Basel 2013

Experimenter announces its participation at Art Basel 2013, Basel between 13 -16 June 2013. The First Choice Preview is on Monday June 11, 2013 at11am and
the fair closes on Sunday June 16 at 8pm. At its stand, Hall 2.1/Stand R4, in the
main section of the fair, Experimenter presents, Graveyard of defiance –
architecture of cities in crisis.

Experimenter proposes three artists Bani Abidi, Naeem Mohaiemen & Hajra
Waheed to respond to the idea of a city in crisis and under siege through an imaginary or a factual narrative, exploring means of skirmish, structures, relationships, changed political fragments and mechanisms that emerge in the ruins.

The fact that most contemporary crisis interventions are staged in cities suggests an urgent need to reflect on an emergent relationship between conflicts and the built environment. Contemporary urban velocity plays itself out within a constructed, real or imaginary architecture, and through the destruction, construction, reorganization, and subversion of space. The existing architecture withstands a wide and spectacular range of urban destruction, some remain standing as symbols of their defiance to their own annihilation.

Despite their brittle bodies that have completely caved in to the forces of a shaken earth, the city remains manage to resist an absolute death. They are at times, in all their pieces, still standing, and depict a monolithic pride that cannot be overcome even in the face of tragedy. In some inadvertent way this reveals all the more these sites' own devotion to the cultures that have erected them and the people who have survived them. Architecture of the city in duress may not just be physical but psychological and even sociological. Conflict compels inhabitants to adopt themselves to their surroundings: live, work and survive within that infrastructure that was. The structure of relationships, also undergo immense changes during these times. The true essence of community and brotherhood and the dark side of vengeance both seem to simultaneously co-exist depending on which side of the conflict one is on.

While Abidi creates a table top installation of mutilated handmade war figurines, Mohaiemen makes a new body of work with found photographs, taken in 1953 of their ancestral home in Dhaka and Waheed creates a series of ink transfer drawings on paper of the continuous demolishment of historic sites in Mecca & Medina for fear of idolatry.