Paris

Art Basel Conversations took place for the first time in the Petit Palais, located in front of the Grand Palais, and was curated for the third year by Paris-based curators Pierre Alexandre Matéos and Charles Teyssou. The flagship talk series featured eleven panel discussions in English and French as well as two performances by Aho Ssan and Christian Falsnaes, bringing together thought leaders from the art world and beyond. The program explored themes such as the evolving gallery and museum landscape, emerging art trends in the non-Western and digital realms, and Paris as an epicenter of Queer culture.

Highlights of the program included the Premiere Artist Talk with Turkish-born French artist Nil Yalter, recipient of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2024 Venice Biennale; a conversation about the seemingly diminishing gap between certain large commercial galleries and public institutions, as galleries hire institutional figures to develop research and exhibition programs; how Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (1873) marked a turning point in the aesthetics of Modernism, from where ‘The Grotesque, the Bad, and the Ugly’ – the title of this conversation and a nod to Sergio Leone’s iconic 1966 spaghetti Western – have become the seeds of an artistic revolution; Paris as a beacon of the homosexual artistic avant-garde, from Natalie Clifford Barney’s lesbian ‘Temple of Friendship’ to the works of Claude Cahun, Christian Bérard, and Jean Cocteau. 

Other conversations explored the relationship between artistic transgression and institutional frameworks; the vibrant and evolving artistic landscape of Dakar, one of West Africa's artistic cradles; the role of hip-hop, graffiti, and dub poetry as forms of artistic resistance and emancipation; the multifaceted life and work of French writer, director, playwright and activist Jean Genet.

The Conversations program took place from Thursday, October 17, to Saturday, October 19, 2024 at the Petit Palais.