In a dramatic shift from previous…
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Art Basel has announced further details of the 2025 edition of its flagship fair in Basel, which will feature 289 galleries from 42 countries (up from 285 at Art Basel 2024). The fair will return to the Messe Basel from June 19th to 22nd, with VIP preview days on June 17th and 18th. This year, the fair will welcome 19 newcomers across the entire fair.
The fair has now announced its robust public programming. German artist Katharina Grosse will present a major new commission on the Messeplatz. The artist is planning to transform the square with her signature spray-painted forms in an installation curated by Natalia Grabowsky, the curator at large for site-specific projects at Serpentine Galleries in London.
Curated by the director of New York’s Swiss Institute, Stefanie Hessler, for the second time, the Parcours sector will present more than 20 site-specific projects under the theme “Second Nature,” reflecting on how human artistic creations can be integrated with the natural environment. Installations will be located along Clarastrasse and the Rhine, including the former Hotel Merian. Another satellite work will be installed in Münsterplatz. Artists featured include British artist Marianna Simnett and Swiss artist Shahryar Nashat.
This edition of Art Basel will feature 22 Kabinett projects—curated presentations within the galleries’ main booths. Among these 22 projects, Annely Juda Fine Art will present a selection of work by Brazilian sculptor Lucia Nogueira, and London’s Herald St will showcase rare paintings by famed Greek artist Alekos Fassianos. Meanwhile, Art Basel’s Unlimited sector will be curated by Giovanni Carmine, director of Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen. It will feature 68 large-scale presentations including those by Cosima von Bonin and Martin Kippenberger.
“This year’s edition is designed to welcome visitors through multiple gateways—whether they’re seeking a first connection or a deeper, more immersive journey into contemporary art,” Maike Cruse, director of Art Basel in Basel, told Artsy.
The main Galleries sector will feature 238 exhibitors, including three first-time participants: London’s Arcadia Missa, New York’s François Ghebaly, and Spanish gallery Prats Nogueras Blanchard. Several galleries that previously showed in other sectors will also join the main section in 2025, including the Chinese gallery Beijing Commune, London-based Emalin, Paris-based Galerie Le Minotaure, Osaka’s Third Gallery Aya, and Prague’s Hunt Kastner.
A new award initiative will debut this year, recognizing 36 artists and leaders from contemporary art and other cultural sectors. The winner, to be announced in May, will be honored during a reception and the inaugural Awards Summit on June 20th.
On the waterfront of Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island, a cloud-like structure has risen. White and amorphous, the building offers few clues from the outside about what lies within. This is Phenomena, the newest permanent museum by the Tokyo-based digital art collective teamLab, opening to the public on April 18th. At 17,000 square meters, Phenomena is now the world’s largest digital art museum. Until now, that record was set by the collective’s earlier art space, Borderless, in Tokyo, at 10,000 square meters.
In many ways, Phenomena, which is based on a new concept that the collective calls “Environmental Phenomena,” is the culmination of everything teamLab has been exploring over the past two-plus decades. The artist collective, which was founded in Tokyo in 2001 by Toshiyuki Inoko, is now estimated to have between 500 and 1,000 members globally (the collective prefers not to officially disclose its headcount). Their members include artists, programmers, engineers, animators, architects, and mathematicians. Describing themselves as “ultratechnologists,” teamLab creates wildly popular immersive digital installations that blur the boundaries between art, science, technology, and the natural world.
In 2024, their Tokyo museum, teamLab Planets, was recognized by Guinness World Records as the most visited museum dedicated to a single art collective, with over 2.5 million visitors in a single year. The new museum, Phenomena, reflects not only the collective’s artistic maturity, but also the dramatic advancements in digital tools and techniques—technologies that simply didn’t exist when the group first began (although teamLab largely creates its own tech). Just as crucially, the museum is the result of a level of ambition that requires substantial resources and institutional support, which teamLab finally has access to. According to the collective, the museum is the most fully realized expression of its vision to date.
Designed by the Abu Dhabi–based firm MZ Architects in collaboration with teamLab, the new structure has some formidable neighbors: the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the forthcoming Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. As the emirate grows in stature as an art world hub, Phenomena is yet another destination in the region for art lovers.
While Phenomena aligns with the broader ambitions of Saadiyat Island, it stands out architecturally. The building’s fluid, organic form feels at once alien and elemental. Every curve and contour has been sculpted in direct response to the conceptual and technical demands of the artworks it contains.
In an interview with Artsy, Takashi Kudo, teamLab’s communications director, likened the building itself to “a cell organism” shaped by the artistic and technological demands of each installation. “The interior is incredibly varied,” he said. “The heights shift, the shapes change—each room was formed around the specific environmental and artistic needs of the works themselves. In the end, the building became something that almost feels alive.”
Indeed, this is not a museum into which art has simply been placed: It is a museum born from the art it contains. The structure was conceived from the inside out and the outside in, mirroring teamLab’s core philosophy: that boundaries—between spaces, people, and phenomena—are illusions.
Unlike the mostly projection-based interiors of teamLab’s earlier museums, here, the building and the artworks form a cohesive system. teamLab describes this system as “living” in the sense that many of the works are directly influenced by environmental conditions such as humidity, airflow, light, and the presence or movement of visitors. “Some works in this museum can only appear here,” Kudo explains. “They depend entirely on the room’s environment—its shape, its humidity, its stillness or motion. If you removed them from this context, they wouldn’t manifest.”
Visitors enter without instructions. There are, in general, no guides, no wall texts or maps to follow. Instead, upon entering the museum, a single artwork greets the viewer in a darkened space: A small pool of water that shimmers faintly. When the viewer touches the water, a unique geometric mosaic appears on its surface. “That fleeting moment is key,” Kudo said. “It can only happen in this space, under these exact conditions. That’s what Phenomena is.”
This responsiveness informs the entire museum experience. In a vast, central hall, towering cylindrical structures are wrapped in cascading digital waterfalls—one of teamLab’s signature motifs. “We’ve shown waterfalls many times before,” Kudo said, “but usually as projections on flat surfaces. Here, they fall around physical columns, through which a depth exists that your body can actually feel.”
Like teamLab’s earlier museums and exhibitions, Phenomena draws power from its scale and spectacle, though here, the effect is even more pronounced. Here, installations are shaped by real-time natural and biological variables, allowing the space to respond together as an evolving ecosystem. In one quiet gallery, softly glowing “ovoids”—a recurring form in the collective’s visual language—float on the surface of a mirror-like pool. “They’ve appeared in earlier works,” Kudo said, “but this is the first time they’re truly free-floating. Their movement becomes something less predictable, more…sentient. They feel like living objects.”
Another haunting work in the museum consists of a dynamic light installation that simulates the movement of air itself. Lines of light—generated through real-time data and projected across the space—curl and twist in response to visitors’ presence, subtly shifting the visual flow. “We wanted to represent something invisible—like wind or fog,” Kudo said. “As your body passes through, the flow shifts. You don’t just see it: You feel it. That’s what we wanted people to notice: the unseen becoming felt.”
Such lofty goals, unsurprisingly, need a lot of room to work. “Honestly,” Kudo admitted, “we didn’t anticipate just how much space we’d need. Some of the works only function at a very large scale. You can compare it with a rainbow—something that only appears under very specific environmental conditions, like precise angles of light and reflection. To achieve that same kind of sensitivity indoors, we had to build entire environments tailored to the artworks’ needs.”
Ultimately, teamLab hopes that Phenomena will not be a museum to be understood, but rather a space to be felt. The collective believes these immersive experiences have the capacity to change audiences’ perspectives. “We want people to feel something different,” Kudo said. “Not just something beautiful or fun, but something that shifts how they think, or feel, about the world around them.”
When I mention the name Archibald Knox, I’…