White Cube returns to Basel with installations by Tracey Emin and Theaster Gates at Unlimited and works by Antony Gormley, Gabriel Orozco, Howardena Pindell, Isamu Noguchi, Michael Armitage, Richard Hunt and others at the fair.
At Münsterplatz, Basel, 2025 Art Basel Awards winner Ibrahim Mahama presents a major new public commission, titled The God of Small Things (2026). Referencing the 1997 novel by Indian writer Arundhati Roy, this sculptural and spatial installation reflects on memory, material and the traces left by colonial and post-independence industrial pasts. Conceived as a series of large suspended forms, the work incorporates rubber as its primary material – a substance whose production is historically linked to the colonial period – alongside jute sacks, metal identification tags from Ghana Cocoa Trading Companies and other industrial remnants.
Theaster Gates is among this year’s Art Basel Awards nominees, alongside Howardena Pindell and Julie Mehretu.
Art Basel Unlimited
15 – 21 June 2026
Tracey Emin
Knowing My Enemy (2002)
Booth U44
Opening concurrently with Tracey Emin’s major exhibition at Tate Modern, London (until 16 August 2026), White Cube presents the artist’s installation
Knowing My Enemy (2002) at Unlimited.
Centred on a ramshackle beach hut salvaged from the artist’s hometown of Margate, the installation incorporates several personal documents from her father. Here the hut becomes a symbol of memory, loss, and inheritance, while the fragile and unstable-looking structure echoes their sometimes distant relationship.
It precedes a solo presentation at White Cube Paris (20 October – 18 December 2026), opening concurrently with Art Basel Paris.
Theaster Gates
A libation in Uncertain Times (2024)
Booth U27
White Cube presents Theaster Gates’s installation
A libation in Uncertain Times (2024) at Unlimited, in conjunction with his major commission for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, opening in June 2026.
The work features approximately 1,000
binbo tokkuri – traditional Japanese sake vessels produced in the Edo period (1603–1868) and marked with family crests – sourced in collaboration with potter Tani Q and now bearing the name of Gates’s production company in Japan, ‘Mon Industries’.
The installation also includes
Shamisen for Malcolm X (2025), a film in which a musician reinterprets blues, prayer songs and melodies by Gates’s musical group the Black Monks on his traditional shamisen, a Japanese string instrument.
Art Basel
16 – 21 June 2026
Booth C13
Highlights include:
Campus Divas (2014), a painting by Michael Armitage, coinciding with the artist’s major exhibition ‘The Promise of Change’ at Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Italy (until 10 January 2027). The work exemplifies Armitage’s distinctive practice of weaving together multiple narratives drawn from history, the media and his own personal recollections of Kenya. Referencing a conversation between the artist and his friend who produces religious rap videos, Campus Divas explores the significance of urban spaces and contemporary culture against the backdrop of East African tradition.
A painting by Howardena Pindell, who has been included in the ‘Icon’ category at the 2026 Art Basel Awards. Pindell will have a presentation at Dia Beacon, New York, in 2027, following Dia Art Foundation’s acquisition of 21 works by the artist.
Richard Hunt’s
Figure Form (1966) represents a significant intersection of the artist’s industrial materials and humanist themes. Crafted from salvaged chrome-plated car bumpers, including components from a 1962-64 Chevy II, the sculpture transforms automotive detritus into a commanding vertical figure. An important early sculpture by Hunt has recently been acquired by the Kunstmuseum, Basel. This is the first significant acquisition of a work by the artist by a European museum.
STALL (2024) by Antony Gormley. Part of the ‘Weave Works’ series that the artist developed between 2018 and 2025, the sculpture is an investigation of the body as a place of indwelling and what it feels like to look out from this space. Gormley’s exhibition ‘Geestgrond’ at KMSKA, Antwerp, Belgium, is on view concurrently (until 20 September 2026).
A new tempera and gold leaf on linen painting by Gabriel Orozco. The artist’s major presentation at White Cube Bermondsey, London, curated by Briony Fer, opens in September 2026.
Isamu Noguchi’s
Figure Emerging (1982/84). Enacting the Japanese crafts of kirigami and origami, the work belongs to a sustained engagement with cut and folded sheet material that runs across Noguchi’s career: from brass sheets inspired by Constantin Brancusi, to the galvanised steel works for which his folding vocabulary became most widely known. It coincides with the 40th anniversary of Noguchi representing the United States at the Venice Biennale.
