At Kunsthalle Basel, sixteen artistic positions converge in a landscape marked by slow change: half-empty spaces, subtle shifts, and barely perceptible ruptures. The works share a muted intensity, the kind that lingers in backyards, waiting rooms, and late afternoons that stretch endlessly. In the background, a city seems to be collapsing in on itself. The streetlights hum. A dog barks once, then falls silent. Something always seems imminent, yet never seems to quite happen.

Under the title After the Afternoon—a subtle shift in the course of the day—the works trace the textures of a place where habits take root, childhood fades, and change seeps in. What remains is a feeling: not quite melancholic, not quite surreal, just a little bit off. Films, like extended afternoons, focusing on waiting and sidelong glances, expand the exhibition. Thus, After the Afternoon becomes a space that is not only viewed but actively experienced through film.

After the afternoon, the day fades. Light stretches thin, breathing becomes heavier and nothing quite starts or ends. In certain landscapes, marked not by monuments but by distances, silences, and the slow choreography of routine, time becomes more oppressive. It’s a pressure that doesn’t announce itself but seeps into gestures, thoughts, and the body itself. After the Afternoon brings together sixteen artistic positions that inhabit this space of creeping tension. This space is not one of spectacle, but rather one of stagnation, where boredom lingers, desire turns inward, and a sense of the future remains suspended.

Systems of Proximity and Control

The works gather in that hour when meaning begins to wane. Not quite day, not yet night. Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė open the exhibition with a single eye hovering above the stairwell. It holds your gaze and returns nothing stable. Shapes dissolve in its pupil—vegetal, unstable, edged in decay. The notion of an autonomous body, sealed off from its surroundings, is exposed as a fiction. Yield II (2021), on the other hand—a sculpture built around a clinicallooking cosmetic mirror—flips the gaze outward. From one angle, it reflects; from another, it distorts. What begins as self-regard curdles into voyeurism.