14 Rooms

Fondation Beyeler, Art Basel and Theater Basel will present 14 Rooms, a major live-art exhibition to be staged in Basel from June 14 to 23, 2014. Curators Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist, have invited 14 international artists to each activate a room, exploring the relationship between space, time and physicality with an artwork whose 'material' is a human being. Giving visitors an insight into a more performative and interactive practice, visitors will encounter a new situation within each of the 14 rooms, engaging in a diverse series of immersive and intimate experiences. The exhibition will feature performative works by artists including Marina Abramovi?, Allora and Calzadilla, Ed Atkins, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Damien Hirst, Otobong Nkanga, Roman Ondák, Santiago Sierra, and Xu Zhen. While the artists themselves are not present in these works, they instruct performers on how to act out their specifications, resulting in over 70 performers—primarily from the Basel region—taking part in the exhibition. Originally commissioned as 11 Rooms by Manchester International Festival, the International Arts Festival Ruhrtriennale 2012–2014 and Manchester Art Gallery, the project was shown as 11 Rooms at Manchester International Festival in July 2011, as 12 Rooms at the International Arts Festival Ruhrtriennale 2012–2014 and as 13 Rooms by Kaldor Public Art Projects at Pier 2/3 in Sydney's Walsh Bay in April 2013. For each edition, the artists list partially changed. www.artbasel.com