Exhibition and text by Martin Chramosta, Basel
Everyone knows the limbo dance, in which you have to dance through a low gap while being bent. Only those who are agile enough get to the other side. The limbo is the seam, the edge, a space in between. There is no escape from there, or only a very selective one. It is a kind of waiting room, an eternal foyer.
Limbus is an exhibition that takes place during Art Basel at Atelierhaus Klingental. Artists have been working here since the 1960s in what is often perceived from the outside as a hermetic situation. Limbus is setting up in Atelier 103 and opening up the building. Invited are 12 artistic positions from Basel, Zurich, Vienna and Paris. What the artists have in common is their activity as operators of exhibition and discourse formats: they are thus active designers of a quasi-self-governed Limbus-like sphere that revolves around institutions and markets as a satellite.
In certain cases, the individual positions presented in Limbus deal explicitly with their own curatorial and organisational practice. In other cases, they are works detached from this practice. The works generate a liminal ambience in Room 103: a small limbo or outer heaven.
With: Esther Eppstein / message salon / Perla-Mode (Zurich), Daniela Baldelli & Markus Lichti / RINOMINA (Paris), Andreas Marti / Dienstgebäude (Zurich), Livio Baumgartner / DIE DIELE (Zurich), Karin Borer and Daniel Kurth / Schwarzwaldallee (Basel), Yanik Soland / BIKINI (Basel), Peter Fritzenwallner / White Dwarf Projects (Vienna), Martin Chramosta / LIMBUS, Katharina Höglinger / Weneverlearn (Vienna), Myles Starr / SORT (Vienna)