Artist talk Cao Fei
Date: Sunday, May 31, 2026, 11 a.m. – 12 p.m.
Location: Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart
Participation free of charge, ticket required via ticket link
Event in German with consecutive interpretation from Mandarin
Cao Fei (b. 1978, Guangzhou) is considered to be a pioneer of digital art. Through video and installation, she blends documentation and surrealism to explore how technology, globalization, and growth shape our lives in the 21st century.
In this talk, Cao Fei offers insights into her thinking and her multifaceted artistic practice at the intersection of the present and the near future. Her exhibition Testimonies to the Near Future transforms the museum into a city-like structure and explores urban space as social infrastructure, psychological landscape, and digital interface—shaped by work, technology, memory, and longing.
Cao Fei works with film, installations, and online platforms, viewing virtual spaces as fields of experience and experimentation where identities are performatively tested. In the process, the boundaries between body and avatar begin to blur, as do those between physical and digital space.
Drawing on the works in the exhibition, this artist talk will focus on Cao Fei’s visual language, which combines documentary strategies with speculative world-building and merges critical observation with poetic condensation. In Cao Fei’s work, the future does not appear as a distant vision, but as a process that is already taking shape in the present.
Participating in the talk are Cao Fei (artist), Daniel Kurjaković (curator Programs, Greeting), and Stephanie Seidel (curator and head of Gegenwart).
