0xCollection is pleased to announce Cosmic Knots — a presentation of immersive installations and live performances.
Before there was matter, there were knots: two species of cosmic string, wound around one another, locking into stable topological structures from which all existence unraveled. The exhibition moves through what the body has always known before language could name it — across the sensory environments of @kurt_hentschlager , the cosmological visions of @marikomori , and the entangled sculptural forces of @gabor_kitzinger , @andrasnagy.xyz , and @rozi_mako .
The installations open at 6 pm on 15 June and remain on view daily 5–11 pm through 20 June.
Franck Areal, Horburgstrasse 103, Basel. Free to the public.
Monday, 15 June · 7 pm Trafohalle, Therwilerstrasse 56, Bottmingen. Tickets are available via our Linktree in limited quantities.
Opening Performance Evening with @alvanoto · Grotesque Gymnastics @teri.gaspar · @mari_mako_ · @dj_dork_
Presented within the framework of @artbasel , in collaboration with OMG, Franck! Festival @omg_franck .
0xCollection is proud to partner with BINÁLÉ for the exhibition WE ARE NOT ALONE in Budapest, Merlin.
Until October 26, the biennial invites audiences to experience otherness — artificial, extraterrestrial, cultural, and within ourselves — through immersive installations, participatory events, and provocative dialogues.
Step into a space where connection, attention, and shared practice are at the heart of art, and the “alien” becomes an opportunity for reflection and encounter.
Artists: Berkes Dorka (HU/A) Mitchell F. Chan (CA) EJTECH (HU/MX) Sarah Friend (CA/D) Kurt Hentschläger (US/A) Holly Herndon; Mat Dryhurst (US/UK/D) Jenny Holzer (US) Ryoji Ikeda (JP) Kim Le Boutin (FR) Kitzinger Gábor; Nagy András László; Mákó Rozi (x crew) Komoróczky Tamás (HU) Kálmán Mátyás (HU) Daito Manabe (JP) Tatsuo Miyajima (JP) Nagy Ágoston (HU) Carsten Nicolai (D) Nam June Paik (US/KR) Trevor Paglen (US) Hito Steyerl (D) Hua Wang (CN/D) Villő Turcsány (HU) Zsembery Bendegúz (HU) Sarfenstein Ditta (HU)
BINÁLÉ is curated by @violukprojects alongside @julenud .
See you in Budapest!
📸: X, created by @gabor_kitzinger@andrasnagy.xyz@rozi_mako
xhairymtantx, created by @holly_herndon & @matdryhurst
Photographed by: Tamás Réthey-Prikkel
UPCOMING EXHIBITION
Announcing “Frames of Reference” - our latest exhibition, on the occasion of @artbasel 2025.
Marking the Collection’s first exhibition in Switzerland, Frames of Reference explores how perception, technology, and material shape our experience of time, both individually and collectively.
📍Bau 69 “The Garage”, Franck Areal, Basel, Switzerland 📅 17 - 22 June
Open daily 14 - 22h
#FrameofReference #0xcollection #ArtBasel #Basel #Technology #Experience
As 0xCollection enters its fourth year, we are delighted to introduce the curator shaping our 2026 programme: Viola Lukács, Director of Curatorial Affairs and curator of Cosmic Knots.
Lukács’s practice attends to the entanglements of human and nonhuman agencies, and to the ecological, technological, and cultural systems whose interdependencies condition contemporary life. She curated MetaMetria (2015), devoted to Bernar Venet, before turning toward the territories opened by digital and optical technologies — developing exhibitions and programmes with Sotheby’s, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and Postmasters Gallery, New York. In 2021 she initiated Generative Dimensions, Europe’s first generative hackathon and conference based on ecological data, and she is the founder of BINÁLÉ (@binale_budapest ), Budapest’s expanded media art biennial. She lectures internationally, including at Harvard, and her writing on digital and time-based media appears across exhibition catalogues and academic publications.
Cosmic Knots is the third chapter in a curatorial arc — following Synesthetic Immersion and Frames of Reference — through which 0xCollection continues to articulate a Basel-based site for the artists, technologies, and discourses shaping contemporary practice in digital and time-based media.
Presented within the OMG Franck! Festival (@omg_franck ) and concurrent with @artbasel , the exhibition extends 0xCollection’s commitment to ambitious production and sustained curatorial inquiry.
THE CONCEPT
0xCollection presents Cosmic Knots, an apparatus that stages emergence as resistance — a field where topology, withdrawal, and perception collapse into a single operative condition.
Drawing from a 2025 hypothesis in cosmological physics, early-universe matter is imagined as emerging from knotted structures of cosmic strings — topological formations that precede atoms, forces, and form. Before identity, there is relation without origin. The knot comes first.
This proposition extends Karen Barad’s notion of intra-action into a cosmological register: entities do not pre-exist their relations but are produced through them. The exhibition displaces the same logic into the field of art. The work is not an image to be seen but a system that conditions seeing itself.
Cosmic Knots assembles practices that complicate circulation, quantification, and capture — works that withdraw from the economy of visibility and do not stabilize as data, image, or object. What remains is not representation but interference: perception as a loop that cannot be resolved into narrative or evidence.
Convened by @violukprojects , the exhibition brings together @kurt_hentschlager , @marikomori , and @gabor_kitzinger + @andrasnagy.xyz + @rozi_mako , whose immersive environments overdrive sensory systems into breakdown states — not to simulate collapse, but to render perception unstable as a method of knowing. The opening performance — @alvanoto , Grotesque Gymnastics @teri.gaspar , @mari_mako_ , @dj_dork_ — unfolds as a temporal field where rhythm, noise, and gesture operate as non-representational coordinates.
Visual identity shaped by @mateserflek .
Colombian artist Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth (2007–08) is a long crack running through the floor of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.
The work does not simulate a crack but produces an actual incision in a newly cast layer of concrete laid over the existing floor. What appears minimal is politically charged: it fractures the museum space and exposes it as shaped by colonial history, violence, and exclusion. The opening is physically real and uneven, shifting from hairline fracture to a deeper gap in which visitors could and did fall. Formed in Colombia and referencing local stone, the intervention links material construction to histories of displacement and racialised division. After the exhibition, the gap was filled, leaving a visible “scar” in the floor as a permanent trace.
The 1970s-2000s institutional museum space in Europe is often imagined as neutral ground: a container for art, separated from politics and lived experience. Shibboleth refuses this illusion.The floor becomes a site of tension, as if the architecture itself were revealing a hidden fault line beneath its surface.
The word shibboleth comes from a biblical moment of linguistic violence.
The Ephraimites are identified by their inability to pronounce a single sound-“sh” - and this difference becomes a method of exclusion and execution. Code becomes the infrastructure of gatekeeping. A phonetic detail becomes a system of life and death.
Salcedo transfers this logic into space. The crack operates like a spatialized accent test: it marks difference without naming it directly. Migration, racialization, and social exclusion are embedded in the ground we walk on. The fissure becomes a quiet diagram of global inequality, where belonging is always conditional and often invisible until it breaks.
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Early forms of telecommunication: television, video, signal, broadcast. In Nam June Paik’s practice, these are not subjects but environments, systems of perception that replace the distance between artwork and viewer with immediate feedback. You do not look at them from outside; you are part of the circuit.
From the Fluxus performances in the 1960s, where Paik famously cut a necktie in One for Violin Solo (1962) and reconfigured performance as interruption rather than representation, to later installations like TV Buddha (1974-2002) or Electronic Superhighway (1995), his work is consistently built from proximity to technology as lived condition.
In TV Buddha, a closed-circuit camera films a Buddha statue watching its own image on a monitor. The loop is almost minimal, but structurally decisive: observation becomes recursion. Read through a Buddhist lens, this self-regarding circuit also evokes introspection, a turning inward that complicates the apparent narcissism of the feedback loop. As Rosalind Krauss argued in Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism (1976), early video establishes a structure in which subject and image collapse into the same reflective system, written only two years after Paik’s work. Paik situates this condition between technological feedback and contemplative self-observation.
Screens in his work are surfaces where perception folds back onto itself. Watching becomes a form of being watched. This logic is pushed further in Global Groove (1973), where fragmented television signals, performance, and commercial imagery circulate as a continuous, unstable flow, an early model of what Lev Manovich would later describe as media organized through database-like logic and realtime recombination.
In this sense, Paik does not stand at the origin of video art as a genre. He operates closer to what MoMA and Tate later frame as the emergence of “video as a system of relations” - where image, viewer, and infrastructure cannot be separated.
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Emerging from a feminist performance lineage that has long examined the domestic sphere as a site of discipline, repetition, and latent violence, @kawitavv (b. 1987) reactivates these concerns through an intensified, corporeal register.
Based in Bangkok, she uses her own physical endurance as material, positioning the body as a site of labour, control, and transformation. Her work investigates how systems of production, both domestic and industrial: shape, discipline, and often erase human presence, particularly in relation to women’s work.
In early works from the Tools series (2012–2014), Vatanajyankur transforms her body into domestic implements, collapsing the boundary between human and object. These performances expose how gender roles are not only socially constructed but physically enacted, repeated, and internalised over time.
Endurance is a language in her work. In pieces like The Scale and The Scale of Justice (2015–2016), her body functions as a weighing mechanism, balancing heavy loads with controlled precision. The tension between stillness and strain becomes central, what appears minimal or even meditative is underpinned by intense physical exertion.
A defining visual strategy in her work is the use of hyper-saturated colour and clean, almost commercial aesthetics. From a distance, her videos resemble advertisements, polished, seductive, and visually pleasing. Up close, however, they reveal discomfort and violence. This contrast mirrors the logic of consumer culture itself, where systems of exploitation are masked by surface appeal.
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In Empirical Construction, Istanbul (2003), Julie Mehretu builds a city that never fully appears. Architectural plans, cartographic fragments, and gestural marks accumulate into a dense, shifting field where no single perspective holds. The painting doesn’t depict Istanbul so much as it registers overlapping histories of migration, expansion, and conflict. Space is unstable, constantly being built and undone at the same time, forming a fictional vernacular architecture that is based on personal storytelling and sensual layers of memory fragments.
This layering has been central to Mehretu’s practice from the beginning. Trained in painting but working across drawing, printmaking, and projection-based processes, she builds her canvases through accumulation: tracing maps, blueprints, and media images, then erasing and reworking them until they become something else. In early works like Stadia I–III (2004), architectural outlines of stadiums collide with flags and corporate symbols, turning sites of spectacle into diagrams of global circulation. Later, in Mogamma: A Painting in Four Parts (2012), references to Cairo’s Tahrir Square, epicenter of the 2011 revolution, are embedded and partially obscured, so that political upheaval remains present but never fully visible.
Her paintings often begin with something concrete like a place, an event, or an image, but refuse to remain fixed there. In works like Hineni II (E. 3:4) (2019), sourced from wildfire imagery, or the large-scale Mural (2009), built from financial maps and institutional architecture, representation dissolves into a kind of visual turbulence. What remains are traces: lines that behave like vectors, marks that suggest movement.
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Étienne-Jules Marey wanted to see what the eye could not. In Joinville Soldier Walking (1883), he broke motion into lines, dots, intervals, the body reduced to a diagram of itself. His method was reductive by design: strip the figure until only the trace remains. Visibility, for Marey, is something manufactured through subtraction.
But the images failed him. Too discontinuous. Where he wanted a smooth curve, a continuous truth, he got interruptions, gaps, a sequence that refused to resolve. Fragmentation was not his method. It was his problem.
Hito Steyerl, born 1966, works inside that failure as though it were the world itself. In How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013), the question is no longer how to produce visibility but how to survive it. Her poor images, compressed, copied, stripped of resolution, cut loose from origin, are what images become when they circulate faster than they can mean anything. In Liquidity, Inc. (2014), Factory of the Sun (2015), and This is the Future (2019), bodies don’t hold together. They flicker as avatars, shatter into pixels, dissolve into the infrastructure that generates and moves them. In I Will Survive (2023), the body is not merely fragmented but procedurally reconstructed from data, generated from its own statistical residue.
What shifts between them is the direction of the problem. Marey faced a deficit of visibility: the invisible had to be rendered measurable. Steyerl faces its inversion, total visibility, which is also total exposure. Not seeing more, but being incessantly seen. Tracked. Predicted. The image no longer helps us understand the world. It organizes it.
In both cases the body is what gets processed. In Marey, reduced to trace. In Steyerl, dissolved into signal. The hundred years between them is the distance between a body that had to disappear to become legible, and one that disappears because legibility has become automated.
A dark body of water pierced by a single beam of light. Slowly, a female body rises from the depths, lifted upward by the light until it disappears into brightness. The light fades, the screen returns to darkness, and the ascent begins again. Almost nothing happens, but the work feels monumental.
Viola reduces the image to a few elements — water, light, a body, time — yet these are the core materials of his entire practice. Water becomes a space of transition, light becomes transformation, and slow motion stretches time into something closer to contemplation than cinema. His videos are often described as technological, but structurally they are closer to painting and religious imagery than to film.
The work was created for Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, but Viola does not illustrate the opera. Instead, he constructs a parallel visual world about love, death, and transcendence. The ascending body inevitably recalls Renaissance paintings of the Assumption of the Virgin, and the vertical screen functions almost like a contemporary altarpiece. Viola’s installations often operate exactly in this space — between museum, cinema, and chapel.
A near-drowning experience in his childhood made water a recurring element in his work, not as danger but as a threshold between worlds. Many of his works show bodies emerging from water, passing through fire, or appearing from darkness, always in moments of transformation rather than action.
Isolde’s Ascension is important because it represents Viola’s mature language: extreme slow motion, archetypal imagery, spiritual themes, and large-scale video installation used not for narrative but for emotional and metaphysical experience. His work helped establish video installation as one of the central forms of contemporary art, and positioned video not as documentation or media, but as a medium capable of addressing the biggest themes in art — life, death, love, and consciousness.
📸: Isolde's ascension - The shape of light in the space after death, 2005
