Imagining Kunsthalle #1 NEU

#1 ROUTINES / curated by Stretcher, Basel / 3 May – 2 August 2026 / Kunsthalle

The first edition of Imagining Kunsthalle is curated by Stretcher, a curatorial project founded in 2023 by the artists Karin Borer and Daniel Kurth. Under the title Routines, video works by seven artists are presented together with recent works by the curators.

The programme brings together a series of video works that focus on the production and circulation of images in everyday life and examine how these images are appropriated. At its core is the question of how visual orders structure our perception and how social power relations, consumerist logics, and constructions of identity are inscribed within them. The selected works conceive of images not merely as representations, but as active agents that influence behaviour and contribute to the production of reality.

By deconstructing the mechanisms of vision, the artists reveal the often invisible conditions under which images are produced and become effective. In this context, routines do not appear merely as repetitive sequences, but as crucial intersections where cultural influences and economic structures overlap with individual experience. It is precisely within these everyday repetitions that a critical potential unfolds: habits can be destabilised, perspectives shifted, and alternative interpretations opened.

The works presented draw on various forms of storytelling and employ archival material, performative strategies, and experimental narrative forms to examine the logics of contemporary image worlds. This gives rise to multi-layered explorations of visibility and invisibility, of proximity and distance, and of the role of images in an increasingly media-saturated present.