Steve McQueen: Bass Volume is the catalog accompanying the immersive installation Bass (2024) by Steve McQueen, which was presented at Schaulager in 2025 and transformed the entire building with colored light and sound. While the texts in the first publication Steve McQueen: Bass (2024) were written before the commissioned work was completed, this second publication focuses on the finished piece. It brings together two new essays by renowned scholars, an interview with the artist, and a wealth of color installation photographs.

In its focus on light and sound, Bass can be understood as a film distilled to its essence – one that expands into the space and draws viewers in. Tina M. Campt describes this experience as a form of attentiveness – “listening to images” – that incorporates not only visual and auditory, but also affective dimensions. Her poetic text interprets the installation as a liminal space that evokes the traumatic history of the Middle Passage. Adrienne Brown expands on this interpretation by reading Bass as a challenge to conventional perceptual patterns, making visible the entanglement of modernity with racialized structures of power. Both essays emphasize the physical dimension of historical aftereffects. The volume is further enriched by an in-depth conversation between the artist and Solveig Nelson, exploring the origins of Bass in McQueen’s early engagements with film and music.

Irma Boom’s design offers an active interpretation of the expansive work. The book’s horizontally perforated pages – featuring spectacular views of Bass at Schaulager – can be separated, revealing shifting perspectives and color combinations. This design choice conveys the visual and spatial dynamism of the installation.

Steve McQueen: Bass is an artist's book, exhibition catalogue, and reader all in one. It is the companion book to the commissioned work Bass (2024) by renowned filmmaker and artist Steve McQueen, initiated jointly by the Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel and Dia Art Foundation. The publication was developed by the Schaulager team in close collaboration with Dia, Dutch book designer Irma Boom and the artist.

The publication opens with a stunning series of 30 double-page photographs—the first third of the book in terms of volume—that vividly capture the color-saturated atmosphere of the intrinsically immaterial and fleeting installation Bass, and transfer its mood and vibrations to the pages of the book. In the middle third of the book, there are five essays by leading experts in musicology, African American cultural studies, and Black studies. Even before the completion of the work, Robert Fink, Paul Gilroy, Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Katherine McKittrick, and Christina Sharpe drew inspiration from Bass to explore the history of bass music and the role of music in the Black diaspora, addressing questions of representation and visibility of Black culture and the concept of the Black Atlantic. Additionally, the book includes a creative reflection by the poet John Keene. An introduction by Donna De Salvo, Senior Adjunct Curator of Special Projects at the Dia Art Foundation, completes the text section.

In addition to the kaleidoscopic images in the front part, the book contains installation photographs in the final third that document the subtle color changes of the work, which consists solely of light, color, and sound. The book concludes with striking photographs of the creation process of the sound component, composed entirely of bass instruments. These snapshots of the recording session capture musicians Marcus Miller, Meshell Ndegeocello, Aston Barrett Jr., Mamadou Kouyaté, and Laura-Simone Martin as they, under the direction of Miller and McQueen, record the sound for the site-specific installation in the basement of Dia Beacon.

The hour-long 35mm anamorphic film Antigone (2018) is the most complex work to date by British-European artist Tacita Dean. The name of this work combines the artist's personal history with the mythological world order: Antigone is the heroine in the eponymous drama by the Greek poet Sophocles. But Antigone is also the name of Tacita Dean's older sister. The name creates a double bond full of ambivalences and is the reason for Dean's exploration of the character.

The leitmotif of the work is blindness. Antigone revolves around fundamental questions of foresight and destiny, seeing and not seeing, and metaphorical blindness as a necessity for artistic work. Dean found the ally for her ambitious project in her medium: for the film she reached deep into the bag of tricks from the early days of cinema, when it was still considered futuristic and enchanted the audience with illusions. To do this, she brought techniques such as masking and multiple exposures out of the sleep of oblivion and adapted them to her specific ideas. Dean left the "seeing part" to the camera, that magical one-eyed box, sending herself into the unpredictable. Antigone is a thoroughly analogue work: Dean assembled the film images, which appear like collages, with and inside the camera using sophisticated stencils and multiple exposures. The result of this experimental project is both a pioneering achievement and a masterpiece.

The Laurenz Foundation also "blindly" got involved in the venture and has accompanied the film from the very beginning. The narrative of the making and impact of this work is illustrated in the book by means of numerous images - production shots, still photographs, drawings by the artist, etc. - and texts. In an essay, Dean recounts her fascination with the name and the character. The transcript of the words spoken in the film complements the artist's book. Antigone belongs to the collection of the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation and is presented for the first time in Switzerland at Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart.

«Plötzlich diese Übersicht» by the Swiss artists Peter Fischli (b. 1952) and David Weiss (1946–2012), a loose collection of over 350 hand-sculpted, unfired clay figures, is one of those artworks that is very familiar even to those who are not all that interested in art. The artists have created a masterpiece, using an entirely unspectacular material to form sculptural snapshots that sparkle with cheerful wit: sketched models of everyday situations and objects; clay reproductions that reveal the absurdity and artificial normality of the ordinary. Alongside them are semi-freely imagined scenes and events from history, culture, entertainment, sport and assorted memories from their own biographies, immortalised in emblematic scenarios. The titles, with their characteristic subtle mockery, fragmentary encyclopaedic knowledge and serious irony, are an integral part of the work. The art book gives an overview of the “Overview”; moreover, the superb illustrations reveal the sculptural aspect of this multipartite work, begun in 1981, the quality and continued relevance of which goes beyond the sly humour of language and creative skill.

Two Awards
The Most Beautiful Swiss Books of 2014
Best Book Design from all over the World 2015

Schaulager is proud and delighted that the artist’s book by Paul Chan "New New Testament" published by the Laurenz Foundation was recently honoured with two prestigious awards. The Swiss Federal Office of Culture (FOC) named Chan's "New New Testament" as one of the most beautiful Swiss books of 2014. In the international competition "Best Book Design from all over the World" in Leipzig, the Stiftung Buchkunst recognised the book with a bronze medal.

Over 1000 pages long, this comprehensive, elaborately bound artist’s book documents “Volumes”, Paul Chan’s work consisting of 1005 book covers, a selection of which was exhibited at documenta 13 in 2012, and which now belongs to the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation’s collection. In 2014, it was shown in its entirety for the first time as part of the exhibition “Paul Chan – Selected Works.” For each book, Paul Chan removed the book block from the cover and then individually overpainted it. For “New New Testament”, Chan has written texts, which are juxtaposed with the individual picture pages. These texts draw on a wide spectrum of writings, from the philosophical, art theoretical, and the literary to the trivial, and the artist has also interwoven them with playfully ironic character sets. Deciphering these beautiful and enigmatic texts is a particular delight.

Created by Matthew Barney, “Drawing Restraint Volume VI” is a chronological sequence of images narrating the dramatic contents of the film “Drawing Restraint 17”, a coproduction between the artist and Schaulager. The film was produced as part of the exhibition “Matthew Barney. Prayer Sheet with the Wound and the Nail”, staged at Schaulager Basel in 2010. The story is a contemporary allegory inspired by the painting “Death and the Woman” by the Renaissance artist Hans Baldung (known as Grien), in which a young woman travels from the Goetheanum in Dornach to Schaulager, where she ultimately meets her death. The conflict between obstruction and conquest set out in the “Drawing Restraint” series also underlies the film’s plot and its artistic interpretation. The sequence of images is choreographed by sheets of handmade Lama Li paper inserted into the book, some of which have been individually hand-torn. This natural variation makes each book unique.