It’s obviously an interesting time to be in Paris, and with everything that’s going on, the city is still as special as ever. While people might have chosen to stay away, I’m glad I’m here witnessing what France does best—stewarding life, culture, and the transmutation between the two. I’m staying in the hills of Belleville, and from the very top I can see the Eiffel Tower shimmer in the distance with its warm yellow glow. I smoke a cigarette and read the leftover protest signs that really aren’t asking for much. Safe schools. Clean water. Access to proper instructors and teachers. Shouldn’t we all demand that? I sit silently and try to pick up on the conversations of the Parisians around me. Life continues. Someone is visiting their mother this weekend. Another is finishing construction on their kitchen. One woman asks her neighbor which fairs they are going to visit this week.
Obviously, I’m not French, and therefore I don’t really get to have an opinion or a say on this contemporary moment. I know my place. And yet, if there is one thing that makes sense to continue during this time, it seems to be art. As I walked home from Art Basel yesterday evening, a friend sent me a tweet shared from Reddit that said, “When you walk through a museum, you’re not just looking at art. You’re moving through centuries of people trying to explain love, grief, power, beauty, and belonging.” That’s its role. That’s my role. Maybe there’s a place for all of it? Even within a ginormous—and yes, very expensive—art fair, an artist has made something that came from their soul, which they are trying to share with you, hoping you might feel a glimmer of what they felt as they made it. The timing, should you look at it that way, feels quite apt.
At the Foksal Gallery Foundation booth, in from Warsaw, Poland, was a work by the artist Paulina Olowska entitled Ecstasy, 2026. The painting is set in the National Museum of Krakow, showing a young woman inside the museum encountering two works of art. A sculpture before her and a tableau behind her—the painting, a serene naked woman riding bareback on a wild black stallion; the sculpture, a bare-chested woman holding items in the air (a cup? a vine?). Possibly in dance? In worship? Both “representations of female abandon.” Olowska is aiming to show a woman’s experience of witnessing her own voyeurism. What has being a woman meant through the ages? What does it mean today? What does it feel like to sit between the two?
Standard Gallery, in town from Oslo, Norway, displays a solo presentation by the Pakistani artist Suleman Aqeel Khilji. Painted with pigment, Khilji’s works and figures are haunting. Maybe it’s because the lightness feels so temporal, like they could dissipate right before your eyes. Because of this, it’s hard to pin down what the figures are doing. Are they in a boat or at a dinner table? Is that a tree or a string of lights? Curious about Khilji, I found a video made by White Cube in which he shares, “Sometimes you look at a tree and that reminds you of a tree thousands of miles away. You can transcend into another space, which is far, far away. But there are these similar characters in spaces.” No matter where you go, you carry the past with you. Or maybe the familiarity means you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. Déjà vu, if I may.
The first Korean gallery to join the Emergence section is P21, presenting works by Haneyl Choi. The new works comprise a project called “Sleepwalking,” drawn from Choi’s personal experiences, with the aim of exploring moments in which the body and its will do not coincide. On the left side is a stack of concrete boxes with wet-looking lines running down its facade from two holes in the top brick. I later found out that it was a weeping fountain in tribute to the closeted gay men of Korea.
I am grateful to have had the opportunity to encounter each of these artists and galleries, all from places I’ve never had the chance to visit. To hear stories that feel familiar and yet so different from my own. To share their grief and their love. To ponder the same questions. To be okay with not having the answers. To continue the search for them anyway. I’ll leave a bit more of my heart here in Paris, the place that brought us all together, even when everything wants to tear us apart.
Power to the people, always.
–Shaquille Heath
*Editor’s note, Art Basel Paris will be closed early, with the weekend dates cancelled at the time of publishing this article, via their social media
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