Tim Etchells’ new work ‘One Day Our Hands’ (2020) is created for the Light Frieze at Neubau, Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland. The full text reads ‘One day our hands will touch again’ and is on view daily 4pm - 10pm from St. Alban-Graben throughout the holidays and January 2021.
Tim Etchells’ new work ‘One Day Our Hands’ (2020) is created for the Light Frieze at Neubau, Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland. The full text reads ‘One day our hands will touch again’ and is on view daily 4pm - 10pm from St. Alban-Graben throughout the holidays and January 2021.
Presented in the context of the Corona virus pandemic, the work’s immediate reference is to the regimes of isolation and social distancing in effect across much of the globe. More broadly Etchells’ text invokes an idea of physical and geographic separation, anticipating the moment at which this distance can be collapsed or circumvented.
"Across the range of my work I use strong, simple, sometimes comical means to get to serious ideas. My practice shifts between gallery and public site, live performance and experimental fiction and concerns itself with questions of contemporary identity and urban experience, our relation to fiction and the media, as well as with the limits of representation, especially in respect of language. Working across different media and contexts opens up new possibilities and allows me to approach the ideas that interest me by different routes, shifting my perspective on the themes and experiences I want to investigate.” - Tim Etchells.
Kunstmuseum Basel’s Neubau was designed by Swiss architects Christ & Gantenbein and opened in April 2016 as the museum’s third venue. The Light Frieze, created by the architects and iart, was designed to be an integral part of the architecture, subtly enlivening the building’s brick facade with words and graphic elements. It interprets the classical element of a frieze, with a revolutionary twist.
One Day Our Hands, 2020. Scrolling LED text. Dimensions variable.
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