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VOLTA Basel - 2026

Internacional

Associated Authors:

|   Martin Wöllenstein  |  

VOLTA Basel - 2026

Perve Galeria is pleased to present Flowing Upstream, a special project by Martin Wöllenstein at VOLTA Basel 2026.

Developed in close collaboration with the Supreme Masqueraders Society in Ghana, the project originates in the Ankos festivities of Sekondi-Takoradi, where thousands of costumes are collectively produced each year and later dispersed or discarded after the celebrations. Working with these materials over several years of fieldwork and research, Wöllenstein reclaims and reconfigures them not as waste, but as a living archive of collective labour, memory, and transformation.

Rather than preserving these objects as documentation, Flowing Upstream dismantles and reassembles them into a new spatial language. What once functioned as carnival costume becomes architectural material for an immersive installation, where fragmentation is not loss but the beginning of a new structure of meaning.

Presented as an immersive labyrinth, the installation dissolves fixed distinctions between inside and outside, object and subject, use and excess. Movement, perception, and participation become central to the experience, while performance activates shifting situations inspired by carnivalesque practices of disguise, transformation, and role reversal.

At its core, the project reflects on how value is constructed: not as an intrinsic property of objects, but as a system of relations shaped by cultural, social, and symbolic frameworks. By redirecting materials traditionally defined as “waste”, Flowing Upstream proposes a reconfiguration of value itself, revealing its dependence on context and interpretation.

The physical journey of these materials from Ghana to Basel via the Rhine further extends this reflection, reversing historical flows of industrial circulation and repositioning remnants of collective celebration within a European institutional context.

Ultimately, Flowing Upstream operates at the intersection of sustainability, imagination, and artistic transformation, proposing not the management of waste, but the reinvention of the conditions through which meaning is produced.

Digital Catalogue

 

 

VOLTA Basel 2026

Dates: June 16-21

Schedule:
Tuesday, June 16 (by invitation only) - 6pm to 8pm
Wednesday, June 17 (by invitation only) - 10am to 8pm  
Thursday, June 18 - 10am to 7pm
Friday, June 19 - 10am - 8pm
Saturday, June 20 - 11am - 7pm
Sunday, June 21 - 11am to 5pm

Location: Hall 4.U, Congress Center, Messeplatz 21, Basel

Catálogo VOLTA Basel - 2026

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Perve is a cultural structure dedicated to the promotion, research, and dissemination of modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on historical, social, and political contexts. It develops exhibition, editorial, and research projects, articulating different institutions and cultural initiatives.

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