Curated by Elena Filipovic

Luke Willis Thompson’s work makes for uncomfortable viewing. Always spare and elegant in presentation, his unsettling installations, performances, and films unflinchingly scrutinize power relations, race, and representation. For Kunsthalle Basel, Thompson is producing a new single-screen 35-mm film projection, which will occupy the entire upper floor. This will be the third film in a trilogy of sorts exploring subjecthood, appropriation, trauma, mortality, and care; the first two, produced in 2016 and  2017, respectively, feature portraits of individuals whose lives have been affected by incidents of police brutality. In this new production, Thompson will suture his own biography to that of the British artist Donald G. Rodney—who died in 1998 at the age of thirty-seven from sickle-cell anemia—to address genetic inheritance, racial division, the body, and pain.

— Polly Staple