Art Basel Awards Summit | Radical reimaginings

Lydia Ourahmane, Artist, Algiers and Marseille
Ibrahim Mahama, Artist, Accra, Kumasi, and Tamale
Moderator: Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine, London

Working across installation, architecture, and performance, artists Ibrahim Mahama and Lydia Ourahmane challenge postcolonial systems of power, displacement, and control. In this conversation with the Serpentine’s artistic director, Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artists reflect on how risk, refusal, and material storytelling have driven their practices, from Mahama’s transformation of everyday materials into monumental testaments to labor and exchange, to Ourahmane’s probing of borders, bureaucracy, and spiritual resonance. They consider how letting go of authorship and embracing uncertainty can become radical tools for reimagining what art is, what it does – and what it could become.

This panel is part of an hour-long session exploring how artists are designing the future.

Nominated in the Emerging Artist category, Art Basel Awards Medalist Lydia Ourahmane is a conceptual artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans installation, sound, video, performance, and sculpture. She graduated from Goldsmiths University in 2014 and has exhibited internationally with recent solo exhibitions at Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona; SculptureCenter, New York; Rhizome, Algiers; Kunsthalle Basel; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent; Portikus, Frankfurt; De Appel, Amsterdam; Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; and Chisenhale Gallery, London. Her work was included in the 60th Venice Biennale (2024); 15th Gwangju Biennale (2024); 15th Istanbul Biennial (2017); 34th Bienal de São Paulo (2021); New Museum Triennial; and Manifesta 12, Palermo (2018).

Nominated in the Art Basel Awards’ Established Artist category Ibrahim Mahama is an artist interested in the redistribution of materials through the making of artistic interventions. His current work focuses on building institutions to connect new audiences to contemporary art. The artist’s studio is not just a place for production but a space for collective reflection about the conditions of the body across time. The artist’s studio can be a space of miracles.

Hans Ulrich Obrist serves on the Art Basel Awards Jury. He is the artistic director of the Serpentine in London, and the senior advisor at LUMA Arles. Prior to this, he was the curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show ‘World Soup: The Kitchen Show’ in 1991, he has curated more than 350 exhibitions. Obrist’s recent publications include Ways of Curating (2015), The Age of Earthquakes (2015), Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects (2015), The Extreme Self: Age of You (2021); 140 Artists’ Ideas for Planet Earth (2021); Edouard Glissant: Archipelago (2021); James Lovelock: Ever Gaia (2023); Remember to Dream (2023); and Une vie in progress (2023).