In 2005 or 2006, Nairy Baghramian arrived for a site visit at Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland to find the pioneering artist Gustav Metzger was there, too. He was scheduled to do a show before her and was walking around the imposing space with the director Adam Szymczyk, when he suddenly became excited at a temporary wall that had been erected. “Oh my God!” he exclaimed. “I’m very happy that this is built in now. Otherwise it would be a totally fascist building, it’s huge. I love this unterbrechung”.
An unterbrechung is an interruption or an intermission. Metzger, the Jewish artist and activist who fled to the UK from Nazi Germany as a child in 1939, found the idea of disrupting this example of monumental neoclassical architecture to be politically potent. Baghramian would go on to base her whole show on that sentence. She left most of the space empty, arranging just a few pieces around that wall.
