Simone Fattal and Hans Ulrich Obrist revisit decades of artistic dialogue

Simone Fattal and Hans Ulrich Obrist have spent decades in conversation, their exchange moving fluidly between the personal and the conceptual, the archaeological and the immediate. Now, for Art Basel Conversations in Paris, they pick up that thread again, allowing it to wind through Fattal’s forthcoming exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, ‘Cities at the Bottom of a Lake’, and her contributions to Art Basel Paris’s Public Program.

The dialogue between artist and curator has long been defined by Fattal’s layered investigations into memory, displacement and the residue of human experience. Her work carries the weight of lived history and displacement; it moves through materials and forms with a kind of archaeological patience, unearthing meaning from the ground beneath our feet. Obrist, whose curatorial eye has shaped conversations across the contemporary art world, brings to their exchange a generosity of thought and an intellectual restlessness that draws out new dimensions from Fattal’s practice.

What emerges from their conversation in Paris is not merely a discussion of individual artworks, but a meditation on the questions that have animated their relationship: how do we represent the unmappable territories of loss and recovery? What does it mean to build narratives from fragments? How does place, whether literal or imagined, become a vessel for meaning?

Fattal’s ‘Cities at the Bottom of a Lake’ speaks to the submerged, the hidden, the layers of civilisation and human presence that lie beneath surface observation. The exhibition itself becomes an architecture of contemplation, inviting viewers into the artist’s sustained inquiry into what endures when certainty dissolves.

For anyone attuned to the deeper currents in contemporary art, this conversation offers rare insight into the generative relationship between artist and curator, and the way sustained dialogue can open new territories of thought. The full conversation is available to view at Art Basel’s digital platform, offering an opportunity to witness two minds moving through ideas with the kind of rigour and imagination that defines the most vital artistic practice.

Imagery courtesy of Art Basel (@artbasel).