Oscar Murillo’s Social Cataracts in Art Basel Parcours 2022

At Art Basel Parcours, which highlights artist interventions in the Basel city center and which takes place concurrently with the 2022 fair, Oscar Murillo’s Social Cataracts will be on view at the UBS Geschäftsstelle - Basel Aeschenvorstadt. Open to the public and co-presented with Carlos/Ishikawa, Kurimanzutto, and Taka Ishii, Social Cataracts is made up of two installations that touch on community, labor, and collectivity. 

The first installation, Mesmerizing beauty, 2022, consists of fifty vacant white plastic chairs, attached to which are wooden batons that appear to support placards typically used in political demonstrations but that in fact are works on paper and canvas based on drawings the artist has made during flights, traveling across continents. The second installation, Arepas y Tamales, 2022, features one hundred wearable sculptures. 

On Saturday, June 18 at 7PM at UBS Geschäftsstelle - Basel Aeschenvorstadt, Murillo will present a live public reading from the 1933 novela Parque Industrial: romance proletario (Industrial Park: A Proletarian Novel), by Patricia Galvão, a Brazilian modernist writer and dissident under the Vargas dictatorship. Part of Parcours Night 2022, the intervention complements the first presentation of Murillo’s installation Arepas y Tamales, giving the audience an opportunity to contemplate and be absorbed into the themes touched on by Murillo’s work. You can learn more about Arepas y Tamales here.

Cover image: installation view, Oscar Murillo, Social Cataracts, 2022, Art Basel Parcours, 2022. Photo by Reinis Lismanis