Diary
The Radar: Elena Filipovic
The Kunstmuseum Basel director’s selects for summer shows in Basel and beyond
Elena Filipovic, Director of Kunstmuseum Basel. Photo: Xandra M. Linsin
- 30 May 2025
For the latest edition of The Radar, Ursula magazine’s uncommon cultural recommendations from friends and colleagues around the world, we met with Elena Filipovic, director of one of the oldest art museums in the world, Kunstmuseum Basel. To kick off the summer, she shares some of her favorite places in the Swiss city and exhibitions to visit across Europe this season.
Basel is a city of contradictions. Tidy façades hide subterranean bars, 15th-century doorways open onto unexpected spaces, a gallery sits behind a gas station. Inside even the most unassuming buildings you might find something—a painting, a party, a passage—that changes your way of seeing.
I moved here over a decade ago and have been peeling back its layers ever since. What keeps me here is its paradox: austere and wild, conservative and the birthplace of LSD. People take their time here. They read wall texts. They remember exhibitions from thirty years ago and still want to argue about them. It’s a city where art is part of the social fabric, not just a lifestyle accessory.
“Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture” is on view at Kunstmuseum Basel through August 10, 2025
Café Schiesser perched above the centuries-old Marktplatz and its red Renaissance town hall
This summer, that fabric is being rewoven again. We’ve just rehung the 15th–19th century collection galleries at Kunstmuseum Basel, invigorating the space with new colors, new juxtapositions and energy. Even Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb seems to be poking his finger at you a bit differently. At the same time, “Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture”—a show devoted to the still little-known, turn-of-the-century Italian sculptor—is shimmering through August. His work still feels radical today, and here it’s seen in dialogue with sixty other artists, from his own time to ours.
Things I love about Basel: that as soon as it heats up, everyone ends up in the Rhine, or grilling and dancing along its edge. That the Hoosesaggmuseum (Pocket Museum) exists—a museum not much bigger than a shoe box, literally built into someone’s front door. That Kunsthalle Restaurant, founded as an artists’ canteen in 1872, the same year as the Kunsthalle itself, still serves food and stories with the decadence of another era—or Café Schiesser, founded in 1870, where you’ll find the best hot chocolate and lemon sorbet in town. When I need drinks, though, I fast forward to the present and head to Renée, Rouine, or the slightly trashy but always fun My Way Bar, for unhinged karaoke.
Deste Foundation’s Project Space hosts a series of contemporary art exhibitions on the island every summer. Photo: Fanis Vlastaras & Rebecca Constantopoulou. Courtesy Deste Foundation
Nairy Baghramian’s exhibition “Nameless” will be on view at Wiels from October 24, 2025 through March 1, 2026. Artwork: Nairy Baghramian, Side Leaps © Nairy Baghramian. Courtesy the artist
Of course, summer isn’t just for staying put. I’ll make pilgrimages to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art near Copenhagen—one of my all-time favorites—for the first retrospective of the late, great Kaari Upson. Then to Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie for a retrospective of Brazilian pioneer Lygia Clark, in Mies van der Rohe’s modernist temple of glass. After that, it’s the Greek island of Hydra, for Andra Ursuţa’s “Apocalypse Now and Then” at Deste Foundation’s Slaughterhouse—I expect no one could occupy that sea-lashed chapel of ruin better than her.
Come fall, a must-see will be the inimitable Nairy Baghramian’s exhibition “Nameless,” at Wiels in Brussels. Housed in a former 1930s brewery (the beer was called Wiels), it’s where I began my institutional career. The consistently smart programming, like this show, keeps me going back whenever I can.
But for now, Basel remains my center. It’s a city that doesn’t try to seduce you. And yet once you’re smitten, you never want to leave.
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Elena Filipovic is director of the Kunstmuseum Basel. Previously, she led Kunsthalle Basel for nearly a decade. She curated the Croatian Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale and co-curated the 5th Berlin Biennale. She has written extensively on art and exhibition histories, and authored David Hammons: Bliz-aard Ball Sale (2017) and The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp (2016).