Art Basel Paris dispatch: what to see beyond the fair this week

Paris Internationale

The twelfth edition of Paris Internationale, which champions emerging galleries, opened earlier this week in the Canal Saint-Martin district, a distance from the city centre. The popular fair, held in a different venue annually, is located on Quai de Valmy, hosting 56 galleries and five non-profit spaces until 24 October. The fair, say the organisers, has a “human scale format that encourages direct encounters between artists, galleries and audiences”.

This collegiate ethos is clearly in evidence, says George Vamvakidis of The Breeder in Athens which is selling works by the Greek artist Kostis Velonis and Istanbul-born Eleni Pitari-Pangalou: “It feels manageable cost-wise, there is less pressure and it makes a nice change after Frieze.” At Glaswegian gallery Kendall Koppe's stand, works by the Scottish artist Keith Farquhar depicting a fleece and a humongous nose, are a hit, while Lucy Beech’s video, photography and sculpture works with Champ Lacombe gallery are another highlight (her stirring Storm film documents a five-hour storm stimulation modelled on a worst-case North Sea tempest).

The events programme is varied and intriguing, featuring significant speakers. Try and catch for instance “Building a Code of Conduct for an Art Organisation: Discomfort and Transformation” on 23 October (panellists include the ethics practitioner Piergiorgio Pepe and Grégory Castera, head of commissioning at Kanal-Centre Pompidou in Brussels).

Tracey Emin, Parvis des droits de l’homme, Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine

The Miami collector Jorge Pérez and his wife Darlene were among the throngs of visitors to the Place du Trocadéro on Tuesday evening, many there for the Eiffel Tower’s light show, but a few pausing over three monumental bronzes by Tracey Emin installed in the shadow of the tower. Part of Art Basel Paris’s public programme, I Lay Here for You (2018), I Followed You to the End (2024) and I Will Not Be Alone (2025) show a female figure in a range of poses, moving from withdrawal to submission and, ultimately, to defiance.

The sculptures, presented by White Cube, also bring an intimate reckoning with loss and survival into a very public setting. Writing on Instagram on 19 October, just after the bronzes were installed, Emin notes how she came to Paris straight after her mother died, taking the first train from London to avoid spending the day crying in Spitalfields. Alone in the city, she found comfort in its museums, visiting Rodin’s studio and the Louvre. “Now I’m here in Paris, missing my Mum, missing my brother Alan, thinking about life and death, time and events, what is real and what doesn’t feel real,” Emin writes. “I’m very grateful to Paris. Paris is a city that stops me from crying and makes me know who I am.”

Kuba by Kutluğ Ataman, Chapelle des Petits-Augustins

Another talking point public art piece is Kutluğ Ataman’s video installation Kuba (2005) presented in the Chapelle des Petits-Augustins at the Beaux-Arts de Paris as part of Art Basel Paris’s public programme and presented by Niru Ratnam gallery. The work, which shines a light on a tightly bounded settlement on the outskirts of Istanbul,made waves when the Artangel commissioning organisation first premiered it in London in 2005.

Telegraph critic Alastair Sooke wrote at the time: “Forty battered televisions, bristling with analogue knobs, have been placed before 40 shabby armchairs. On each screen, a resident of Küba, one of Istanbul's most downbeat districts, with a heavy Kurdish population talks fluently about everything from scavenging for bread in the garbage to the impossibility of stopping smoking and the terror with which local psychopaths rule the roost.”

The piece certainly feels prescient twenty years later. Questions of migration, urban transformation, displacement and belonging have become ever more pressing, says a gallery statement, while “debates surrounding who has the authority to represent communities remain central to contemporary culture”.

Les Hôtes du Louvre: Kader Attia and Elizabeth Peyton, Musée du Louvre

The artists Kader Attia and Elizabeth Peyton set up their own studios at the heart of the Musée du Louvre to mark the museum’s 230th anniversary in 2023, working on site from December that year to June 2025. Their residencies are part of a contemporary art initiative at the museum entitled “Les Hôtes du Louvre or "Hosts at the Louvre" (“hôtes” can also mean guests in French).

The works produced at the Louvre are displayed in a joint exhibition in the museum’s Chapel Room (until 14 December). Peyton immersed herself in the Louvre collection, working alongside young artists from Paris’s Ecole des Beaux-Arts, copying and reproducing notable works dotted around the museum. Her 2005 portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte hangs alongside a later depiction of film star Jennifer Lawrence (2025).

Attia meanwhile brings to the fore the crimes of Marshal Bugeaud whose statue stands on the Louvre façade. In a stirring video, he highlights how, in the artist's words, Bugeaud is ”lauded as a hero in France, yet embodies the monstrosity of colonialism in Algeria” (the 19th-century military commander was responsible for the enfumade attacks in Algeria where resistance fighters and civilians alike were asphyxiated, says Attia). Attia also shows a series of “witches’ mirrors” scarred with gashes and pockmarks that disorient the visitor's image and perspective.

Ibrahim Mahama, The Harvest Season, Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain

The Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama continues his art world ascent after being ranked at the top of ArtReview's “Power 100” last year. The Fondation Cartier, one of France’s most prominent private art foundations, showcases not just Mahama’s recent works and installation but also pieces from nine artists and collectives, all of whom have long-standing ties to him. Highlights include paintings by Gideon Appah such as Cecilia (Triptych) (2020-21) and screenprints by Zohra Opoku.

Visitors entering the gallery first encounter Mahama’s startling, vast parliamentary chamber known as Parliament of Ghosts which acts as a metaphor for failed democracies, linking to the miliary coup in 1966 in Ghana and the dissolution of its government.

Another show-stopping installation is Things Fall Apart (2026). Comprising masses of glass bottles and crates, it fills the exhibition hall; the materials were all extracted by Mahama from an abandoned glass bottle factory located in Aboso, southwestern Ghana, and taken to his Red Clay art complex in Tamale. “By reactivating the factory in the form of an artwork that makes use of the original materials, the artist succeeds in placing Ghana’s industrial heritage within a narrative focused on the future,” reads a wall text.

Le Large, Ile Seguin

Private museums take centre stage in Paris with another key establishment joining the pack this week. The French capital's newest contemporary art centre opened last Saturday (17 October) on the Ile Seguin, in Greater Paris's western reaches. Dubbed simply Large (or “le Large”), it is the latest philanthropic venture from the Emerige real estate group and takes centre-stage in the wider Pointe des Arts development.

The inaugural exhibition echoes the island’s automotive history as the site of car-maker Renault's primary manufacturing plant for the better part of the 20th century. Entitled Imaginary Engine and curated by Cecilia Alemani, the show places more than 50 works from Renault's own collection, the Fonds Renault pour l’Art et la Culture, in dialogue with 17 new commissions from contemporary artists.

The Renault production plant became a de facto exhibition space, which displayed works including a chromatic mural by the late Argentine-born artist Julio Le Parc in its café (Peintures en frise, Frieze Paintings, 1971–74). The Op-Art pioneer’s vibrant 45-panel rainbow artwork, made with automotive paint, was physically integrated into the architecture of the basement staff cafeteria and now neatly takes pride of place in the inaugural show.

Other works featured look to the technology and aesthetics of automobile construction in innovative ways. The US artist and choreographer Madeline Hollander tracks the Earth’s rotation through a series of flickering car headlights (Sunrise/Sunset, 2021) arranged in columns, forming a “ballet of light”, says the exhibition catalogue. A series of poignant photographs by Shirin Aliabadi dating from 2005 (Girls in Car) show Iranian women posing in cars, resisting societal restrictions.