Ten things to see and do at Art Basel Paris 2025

As Art Basel Paris 2025 arrives, the city pulses with ideas and artistic encounters – from Kai Althoff’s enigmatic new paintings at Tramps’ inaugural Paris space to Dash Snow’s intimate Polaroids at Morán Morán, and Turner Prize-winner Helen Marten transforming the Palais d’Iéna with 30 Blizzards., a hybrid installation-performance mapping human experience through sculpture, video, and live performance.

Elsewhere, Greek artist Marietta Mavrokordatou reimagines a harp shop as a melancholic study of urban solitude, while at the Lycée Turgot, Eugene Kangawa and A-POC Able Issey Miyake explore the poetic intersections of light, fabric, and technology through guided tours and workshops. There are also radical publishing and book launches, with Pina magazine celebrating its second issue – featuring an exhibition by Forensic Architecture – at an event hosted by After 8 Books at Paris Internationale.

At night, don't miss the Berlin-based curatorial platform Trauma, throwing an evening of music, art and performance on 23 October at U122AE, the subterranean club located at 13 Rue de Belhomme. And beyond the main fair, make sure to visit Place des Vosges, 7 Rue Froissart, and Paris Internationale – art fairs that bring together some of the most exciting artistic voices in contemporary art working worldwide today.

Ten things to see at Art Basel Paris 2025

Tramps: Kai Althoff

Inaugurating the Tramps gallery space, Kai Althoff returns to Paris with a compelling new presentation following his recent exhibitions in the city at Galerie Hussenot and Modern Art. The second chapter of an exhibition first presented at Studio Casoli in Filicudi, the exhibition brings together paintings, drawings, textiles, sculptural objects, and carefully arranged photographic excerpts on partition walls, which present the artist’s working process and magnify the delicate, thorny beauty embedded in the paintings themselves.

Althoff is one of the most revered painters of his generation and has long explored the intertwined realms of persona, memory, and materiality. His dense, elliptical compositions hover between devotion and delirium: expect interiors filled with fragile figures, faded fabrics, and cryptic symbols, each fragment hinting at a whole that may never be fully seen, a central provocation to Althoff’s practice. This iteration of the exhibition reflects the urban nature of Paris, contrasting with the airy openness of its summer counterpart in Italy.

Passage du Caire, 33 Rue d’Alexandrie, 2e arrondissement. Open until 7 December, Tuesday–Saturday, 11:00–19:00

Dash Snow: ‘Carrion’ at Morán Morán, curated by Jeppe Ugelvig

Morán Morán inaugurates its new Paris project space with ‘Carrion’, a survey exhibition of American artist Dash Snow’s (1981–2009) Polaroid photography, curated by Jeppe Ugelvig. A chronicle of early-2000s New York, post 9/11, and pre-social media, ‘Carrion’ captures a world of skaters, party-goers, squatters, and hipsters navigating sky-rocketing consumerism, jingoism, and celebrity mania.

Born into the prominent de Menil family, Snow moved between subculture and art-world royalty, and tragically died of a drug overdose in 2009 at the age of 27. Drawing connections between Snow and Baudelaire’s fascination with beauty in decomposition, in ‘Carrion’, Ugelvig positions the artist as both a prophet and a romantic whose work translates the finality of the analogue era. Far from mere downtown legend, Snow’s photographs document the fragile poetics of modernism and their grainy analogue quality captures a world on the brink of digital domination.

5 Rue Saint-Gilles, 75003 Paris, from 21 October – 29 November 2025

Eugene Kangawa x A-POC Able Issey Miyake

The collaboration between Japanese artist Eugene Kangawa and A-POC Able Issey Miyake represents a dialogue between visual art and design-led textile research. Emerging from a three-year exchange between Kangawa and A-POC Able’s creative director Yoshiyuki Miyamae, the project originates in Kangawa’s ongoing painting series Light and shadow inside me (2021-), first seen at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.

Presented in a scenography conceived by Paris-based architect Tsuyoshi Tane, the installation foregrounds a newly developed ‘bit-level fabric’ that shifts from black to white through woven density, rather than with dye. Displaying test pieces, prototypes, and working tools alongside Kangawa’s related works, the exhibition also includes guided tours by Kangawa and Miyamae, along with an on-site workshop. The exhibition is an evolving archive of artistic and technological collaboration that will continue in Tokyo and Osaka later this year. Admission is free, although booking is required.

Lycée Turgot, 40 Rue Volta, 75003 Paris. From 24–25 October (11:00–19:00); 26 October (11:00–18:00)

Cheruby x Viscose Journal: ‘Fashion Sensorium’

This week, Paris is focused on visual art, but Viscose Journal turns up the volume on something rarely given space at an art fair: sound. The independent journal for fashion criticism launched between Copenhagen and New York in 2021, and has built a cult following for its rigorously edited, concept-driven topics that critically dissect fashion and the fashion industry.

Now, for its Paris launch of Issue 08: Sound (alongside a reprint of Issue 07: Scent), Viscose and the Shanghai-based collective Cheruby transform the Paris Internationale fair into a live experiment in sensory thinking. On 24 October, they will feature Thai sound artist Tanat Teeradakorn, who presents newly commissioned works exploring how style might be heard rather than seen, translating texture and rhythm into acoustic form. Alongside Teeradakorn, Swedish scent collective Store Skuggan presents Monkeyflower, a perfume inspired by a once-fragrant flower that mysteriously lost its scent, a poetic meditation on loss, mutation, and extinction.

Meanwhile, Mexican artist and designer Bárbara Sánchez-Kane will also showcase a new installation that dissolves the line between art and fashion, in a space where sound and scent present a new experience, inviting visitors to listen differently and to think of fashion not as something we wear, but as something that resonates, vibrates, and disappears.

Paris Internationale on 24 October

Helen Marten: ‘30 Blizzards.’, presented by Miu Miu

For its second year as Public Program Partner of Art Basel Paris, Miu Miu presents 30 Blizzards., a new commission by Turner Prize-winning artist Helen Marten. The installation-performance hybrid unfolds across five sculptural platforms and corresponding video works, tracing a loose meteorology of human experience through childhood, community, sexuality, interiority, and loss.

Marten is known for her linguistically charged assemblages and use of symbols, and at Palais d’Iéna extends her exploration of how language inhabits material form, constructing what she calls a ‘map of emotion’ in 30 Blizzards. Developed with theatre director Fabio Cherstich, whose practice spans experimental opera and scenography, and sound artist Beatrice Dillon, the performance introduces 30 characters conceived less as actors than as semiotic systems, gestures or weather fronts in human guise.

Palais d’Iéna, Paris, 22–26 October (Preview: 21 October)

Airbnb x Art Basel Paris: ‘A Curated Experience with Loïc Prigent’

Following their 2024 collaboration, Airbnb and Art Basel continue their partnership with a new series of immersive cultural experiences across the fair’s global editions. In Paris, the initiative takes shape as an intimate, guided encounter led by Loïc Prigent, known for his sharp-eyed documentaries (Signé Chanel, The Day Before); a journalist and satirist, he has become famed in the fashion world as one of the most witty commentators.

As part of Art Basel Paris’ ‘Oh La La!’ programme, curated by Prigent, a selection of galleries will rehang their booths midweek, reframing their displays in response to the fair’s evolving energy over the week. Prigent’s tour offers rare insight into this process, combining his humour and cultural fluency with behind-the-scenes conversations with artists and gallerists, and access to the fair’s Collectors Lounge.

The collaboration underscores how Airbnb and Art Basel are reimagining hospitality as a form of cultural mediation and where access, curiosity, and conversation replace exclusivity. With limited spots still available for Friday’s session, this experience promises a uniquely Parisian blend of insight and wit: an art-world tour guided by one of its sharpest chroniclers. Book your place on the tour here.

Massimodecarlo Pièce Unique: Elmgreen & Dragset

Visible through the street-facing vitrine day and night, a new installation work depicts a gallery assistant slumped at her desk behind an open laptop. She’s exhausted. Part performative mise-en-abîme, part allegorical mirror, Berlin-based duo Elmgreen & Dragset’s installation confronts passersby with the ambiguities of labour, visibility, and institutional ritual. Is she asleep, disengaged, or quietly protesting? The absurdity is both humorous and unnerving, a hallmark of Elmgreen & Dragset’s practice, and echoes Prada Marfa (2005) and their 2024 Musée d’Orsay exhibition ‘L’Addition’, where inverted male figures disrupted traditional hierarchies.

October 2025 compresses these concerns into a single human proxy, a microcosm of gallery life that collapses critique and fiction, and asks what remains unseen in the everyday theatre of display. The gallery’s Instagram captures passerby reactions that are as telling as the work itself.

57 Rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris in October 2025

Marietta Mavrokordatou: ‘Downtown Blues’

Situated in the Viaduc des Arts, a repurposed railway viaduct in the 12th arrondissement, an area known for its artisanal ateliers, Greek artist Marietta Mavrokordatou presents ‘Downtown Blues’ in The Harp Store, in which she constructs a spectral interior where painting, video, and sculptural debris converge to evoke Paris as both subject and symptom: a city perpetually haunted by its own image. Mavrokordatou is known for her innovative approach to photography, often employing macro lenses and experimental optical techniques to reflect her own visual impairment into her work. The resulting soft-focus, near-abstract images resemble eyes, landscapes, or interior spaces, collapsing the distinction between self-portraiture and perception itself. These works operate as acts of translation, turning the instability of sight into a metaphor for the instability of memory, identity, and collective vision.

In ‘Downtown Blues’, she extends this inquiry to the architecture and aura of Paris, creating an installation that feels both cinematic and introspective. Having previously exhibited with Brunette Coleman in London and elsewhere internationally, Mavrokordatou continues her rigorous investigation into how the spaces we inhabit shape and mirror our inner lives.

The Harp Store, 107 Avenue Daumesnil, 75012 Paris. Opens on 22 October

Barbara Kruger x Performa x Item Idem: ‘The Drop’ (2025)

Few artists have defined the visual politics of our time like Barbara Kruger, whose bold typographic works, red, white, black, and defiantly feminist, have shaped how we see power and persuasion in art. To mark Performa’s 20th anniversary, Kruger’s Untitled (The Drop) returns with Item Idem as a limited series of multilingual apparel featuring her signature slogans, now translated into French and Arabic.

Originally conceived for Performa 17, the project moves from billboard to body, transforming critique into circulation. Oversized jumpers and tees emblazoned with statements like ‘Your gaze hits the shirt’ turn the act of wearing into a form of dissent. Founded by RoseLee Goldberg, Performa has long expanded performance into the social sphere – and here, art becomes commerce’s mirror: proof that a T-shirt can still be a political gesture.

Opening on 20 October, 12pm (online and in-store at Item Idem, Paris)

No Tax: Reba Maybury & Lucy McKenzie: ‘Pervert or Detective?’

Curated by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen, this incisive exhibition brings together Reba Maybury and Lucy McKenzie in a provocative exploration of power, authorship, and erotic labour. Within No Tax’s arcade-like vitrines, murals, drawings, and collaborative works stage acts of control and complicity: Maybury, whose practice merges political domination with visual art, directs her submissives to create under her command, probing masculinity, labour, and authority. And McKenzie, known for her intricately detailed trompe-l’œil paintings and architectural interventions, investigates authenticity, illusion, and institutional power.

At the exhibition, buy a copy of Pervert or Detective?, a publication by Reba Maybury and Lucy McKenzie, which presents an extended conversation between the artists, moderated by Marie Canet, and published by No Place Press (MIT Press). With essays and an afterword by Susan Finlay, the book extends the exhibition’s themes. Together, the show and publication reveal the intertwined dynamics of eroticism, labour, and artistic creation, making this a must-see exhibition for those interested in power, performance, and authorship.

More info here.

38 Rue St Sabin, 75011 Paris. 21 October – 9 November. Opening and Book Launch: 21 October, 5–9 pm