Supermarket

Things do not have value. Value is produced.

A supermarket is one of the clearest places where we learn this lesson. Every object has been packaged, transported, priced, positioned, and illuminated before it reaches us. Choice feels personal, but it is carefully engineered. Desire appears spontaneous, but it is choreographed through infrastructure.

Exhibition approaches the supermarket not as a place where food is sold, but as a system that organises visibility, movement, labour, attention, and value. Responding to this year’s Kunsttage Basel theme Culinary Infrastructures, the exhibition asks what happens when these same mechanisms enter the gallery. How are artworks displayed, circulated, and assigned value? What remains invisible behind the finished object? And what kinds of economies, material, emotional, ecological, or political, exist beneath the polished surface of consumption?

Artists: Kim Käsermann, Ramon Iten, Elsa Naude, Sacha Rappo, Benjamin Richli, Dafne Cardinale Sánchez, Sylwia Zawiślak, Cedric Zellweger
Curator: Aleksandra Cegielska
Photos credits: Eleven Ten