5 Genre-Defying Installations By Women Artists At Art Basel Unlimited 2025

It takes a village to build Art Basel’s most spectacular show, ‘the Unlimited section’. Since its inception in 2000, this section – annually hosted in Basel, Switzerland – has proven to be the most ambitious, large-scale, and elaborate showcase among global art fairs. Below you will find contemporary art installations that push the idea of defined scale and scope beyond one’s imagination. Uncanny to conventional art fair booths, the curation features monumental installations, colossal sculptures, boundless wall paintings, comprehensive photo series, expansive video projections, live performances, and much more. These larger-than-life sculptures truly stand as a testament that great art doesn’t always need to be defined within the cube. The 16,000 square meter hall proves to be the ultimate canvas for curator-art critic Giovanni Carmine, as he tailors the space to suit 67 compelling cutting-edge installations. The lineup includes contemporary stalwarts such as Jeff Koons, Yayoi Kusama, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, to name a few, that truly make one go in awe. Just ahead of the Unlimited Night on June 19, it seems a herculean task to curate a guide. However, we put together a list of five unmissable genre-defying installations by women artists that truly stood out at the Art Basel Unlimited section this year.

1. ‘Danse Macabre’ By Nicola Turner –  Annely Juda Fine Art, #U20

“Basel’s own Danse Macabre mural, painted around 1435-1441, remained one of the city’s greatest attractions until it was torn down by locals, who declared it a scandal, in August 1805. I wanted to update this theme in the context of contemporary pandemics”, shares British artist (b. 1967) Nicola Turner. Known for creating visceral installations from wool and horsehair, Turner presents a 10-metre-high installation. Presented by London-based Annely Juda Fine Art, the work possesses an animalistic quality, with tentacle-like elements that weave around and interact with their surroundings, much like a plant reaching for sunlight.

Her visual language is inherited and inspired by her mother’s profession as a furniture restorer. “I was always around upholstery materials, and they are inherent to my lived experience and generational story. By choosing, and indeed re-using, materials [such as horsehair and wool] that have had a previous life, my work reminds us of our entanglement with our surroundings and the wider interconnected energies of which we are a part”, she adds. At its core, ‘Danse Macabre’ explores fundamental dichotomies such as life and death, human and non-human, attraction and repulsion.

2.  ‘Midnight’ By Arlene Shechet – Pace Gallery, #U25

Drama peaks on the Art Basel floors with this gravity-defying, made of about 25 feet of aluminum, installation by American sculptor Arlene Shechet (b. 1951). The popsicle-hued installation marks the largest of six outdoor sculptures commissioned for her landmark Girl Group exhibition at Storm King Art Centre last year. Presented by Pace Gallery, the sculpture is valued at a whopping $1.2 million.

Blending digital precision with intuitive, hands-on fabrication, ‘Midnight’ exemplifies Shechet’s radical approach to large-scale sculpture – one that challenges the medium’s traditions and conventions through bold colouration, surface variation, and a visual language rooted in movement and improvisation. “All of my works have a nod towards fragility or vulnerability”, she remarks.

3. ‘We Rise By Lifting Others’ By Marinella Senatore – Mazzoleni, #U2

A 34-metre-long light installation welcomes the viewers as they enter the Unlimited section. This is a light sculpture or luminarie presented by the multidisciplinary Italian artist Marinella Senatore (b. 1977). Titled ‘We Rise By Lifting Others’, the installation merges historical tradition with contemporary discourses, reinterpreting the Baroque-era use of ephemeral architectural displays as a form of storytelling and social commentary. “The installation is a contemporary monument for the people – here and now. Historically, monuments have often commemorated white, male figures and are frequently linked to war. This work, by contrast, is about community. I want every viewer to feel that this belongs to them – a shared space to experience togetherness, to embrace and celebrate the multitudes within us”, shares Senatore.

The installation was first presented at the NOOR Festival Riyadh under Jérôme Sans’ curation. Reimagined for Art Basel, this iteration features a refreshed palette and new textual messages. The phrases – ‘We Rise by Lifting Others (attributed to American lawyer and orator Robert G. Ingersoll) and ‘I Contain Multitudes’ (from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself) – were originally chosen through participatory workshops: the former by female inmates in Florence, the latter by residents of disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Naples. “Every phrase I use is chosen collectively. This is crucial to my practice. These phrases carry the personal and collective biographies, traumas and imaginations of entire communities.”, she adds. Presented by Italian gallery Mazzoleni, Senatore is the only Italian artist featured at Art Basel Unlimited this year.

4. ‘Released Form’ By Sagarika Sundaram – Alison Jaques, #U24

A very Pollock-esque aesthetic that may seem like an abstract painting but is actually a textile installation, eerily suspended at the rear end of the Unlimited hall. The tempestuous splashes of reds, oranges, teals and ochres define Indian textile artist Sagarika Sundaram’s (b. 1986) latest installation titled ‘Released Form’. Commissioned by the UBS Art Collection at the Art Basel Miami 2024, the three-panelled installation nods to the double cloth weaving technique, where woven threads multiply the width or length of a single cloth. “‘Released Form’ takes its title from the way the piece is constructed – out of a single piece of cloth, with no sewing. It continues my exploration of sculptural textiles that emerge from and release themselves, like an accordion unfolding. The idea of release – from structure, from self guides the work”, shares Sundaram. 

One of the most ambitious installations by the artist to date, the textile opens like a concertina, blurring boundaries between void and structure. “Where does laughter come from in the body? I’m working from that same unknowable space as I move around and throw fibre down, making marks that coalesce into compositions”, she adds. Created over a span of a month, this installation stands for transformation and alchemy. The installation is presented by London-based Alison Jaques in collaboration with Indian gallery Nature Morte. “Showing this piece here feels like offering it the freedom it has always asked for”, Sundaram shares.

5. ‘Conversiones’ By Claudia Martínez Garay – GRIMM, #U3

Limits of depth and dimensionality play a central role in the 12-metre-long mural by Peruvian artist Claudia Martínez Garay (b. 1983). Titled ‘Conversiones’, the painting presents a series of imagined spaces – floors, walls, ceilings, skies, and vast voids – that narrate stories connected to the brown body and its interactions with space, people, and culture. “The core thought comes from the title itself, ‘Conversiones’ (conversions in English), and the multiple meanings around the word. ‘Conversiones’ in the sense of an unequal exchange, sometimes forced, sometimes inevitable, sometimes chosen”, shares Garay. 

Painted over four months, the mural incorporates stark symbolic motifs, such as the Bible, a watch, and a wheel. “These elements seem to be falling from the sky towards some hands like a rain of civilisation items brought by Spaniards. This is what is taught until today in school books, always mentioning what they brought, never what they erased or the inflicted barbaric violence they did”, she adds. These narratives explore how the brown body collides with, adapts to, or resists a state of dystopia. Presented by GRIMM, the mural has been acquired by Pérez Art Museum Miami, USA.

Art Basel will run until June 21, 2025, in Basel, Switzerland.