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2024

WHAT I LIKE, 2023/24

WHAT I LIKE, 2023/24

Under the title "WHAT I LIKE" at St. Johanns-Vorstadt 33 in Basel, I regularly showcase projects, ideas, sketches, art, both the familiar and the unknown in the front space. In the back part of the room, a small cabinet of curiosities is growing with old and new objects, precious and mystical works. This space is intended not only to serve as a source of visual inspiration but also as a meeting point for exchange. Moreover, it aims to provide the opportunity to engage with current events.

Involved Artists:

Franz Burkhardt (DE), Littmann Klaus (GE), Peter Knapp (CH)

The Project

WAS MIR GEFÄLLT, St. Johanns-Vorstadt 33, Basel. By appointment +41 76 370 63 23 or just drop in.

WHAT I LIKE
Klaus Littmann’s new open space at St. Johanns-Vorstadt, Basel

The room is simple, it has high ceilings, it extends into a back room and remains visible through the window around the clock. Klaus Littmann will use it to humbly confront the superlatives of the art world. Because the collective experience of locally developed art is not the only tool with which the artist and initiator insists on surprise, insight and emotions in an urban setting. The interior promises more intimate reflections and the luxury of wordless dialogue – with things that touch on memory; with sketches that share visionary ideas; every now and then with a work that does not want to first mention the outstanding achievements of an artist’s life, but wants to wrest a different way of calculating time, humour and sensuality from everyday life.

Who defines how many exhibits make up an “exhibition”? Who determines the boundary between “objet trouvé” and fine art, between purpose and poetry? If every internationally oriented show in Basel had to measure the assertion of relevance and sustainability by its own ecological footprint, museums and galleries would have closed long ago. If the rhetoric of assertion of the most important, youngest and most innovative artist were to be measured against nature, cultural diversity would evaporate in no time. Why not just determine what you like? Klaus Littmann’s new open space at St. Johanns-Vorstadt does not allow itself to be dictated to. It is not preceded by any consensus-oriented commission or group work nor by a project description with a financing plan. Instead, What I like scans the city’s cabinets of wonder for private treasures and isolates phenomena of nature as an attraction. In addition, the door is open for insight into emerging cultural projects. Small and simple, without any annual planning or standardized wording, the room becomes a manifesto of independence, a discreet enhancer of poetic intelligence, a stopover in the marathon of cultural reception, the defence of an exclusivity that distances itself from high-priced status symbols.

What I like is neither a gallery nor an artist-run space. The profit generated by the room will not be reflected in numbers, but in mental credit, as can only be accumulated by a subjective selection. It manifests itself as the trust of accomplices and lenders and in the respect of a public, which also occurs in the encounter of individuals.

Isabel Zürcher, October 2023

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