Petrine | Liste Art Fair Basel 2025

Gallerytalk: Highlights der Liste Art Fair Basel 2025

For the 2025 edition Liste Art Fair Basel, Petrine is showing a solo presentation of new work by Boz Deseo Garden.

Garden’s practice works within the material and conceptual impasses between Atlantic slavery and Western thought. Through sculpture, video, and critical writing, Garden positions transatlantic slavery as the unconscious binding thread across knowledge production, modernist conceptions of form and matter, and psychoanalytic modes of enjoyment.

For Liste Garden proposes a new installation titled The Virtual Estate of Elena Becher (2025). The installation comprises five objects from the Tutti.ch catalogue of Elena Becher, excluding a ledger from the Transatlantic Slave Trade—documenting the exchange rate across enslaved Africans and Swiss textiles—that found its way into her family’s stewardship. Becher, a once-successful real estate agent in 1990’s Zurich, has now retired in Basel. Each object is displayed in individual corridors, including a HiFi cassette and CD player, a porcelain hen, a fossilized Gastropoda shell, a 60” Woodland recurve bow, and three illuminated iron deer Christmas decorations.

Becher proposed lending the ledger to Garden for the duration of the exhibition. Garden declined this proposal, leaving the ledger omitted from the exhibition. Each object is cast as (titled after) the six characters (or figures) that appear in a printed excerpt from Marquis De Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom: Dolmancé, Madame De Saint Ange, Augustin, Eugenie, Le Chevalier, and The Whisper.

The provenance, methods of acquisition, and prior uses of each object are left unclear. The non-presence of the ledger transforms each object into a metonym for something else. The ledger, as a metonym for the Slave or the institution of slavery, is not omitted as much as it is, to borrow from Saidiya Hartman, “replaced by other signs of value” or drowned in abstraction.

Garden’s ‘omission’ of the ledger engages Saidiya Hartman’s indispensable critique of aesthetic proximity in Scenes of Subjection. In her reading of John Rankin’s ‘empathetic literature’ on the ‘evils of slavery’, she indicts the liberal desire to “bring slavery close” through the melodrama of representation for the purported “benefit” of abolitionist campaigns. In some sense, Rankin’s histrionic and certainly erotic attempt to grasp the horrors of slavery is no different than Eugenie and Madame De Saint Ange’s desperation to capture the particulars of Augustin’s torment. Where Sade leaves the content of the whisper a question, Garden provides, precisely by paradoxically ‘demonstrating’ its effacement, the devastating answer. For Garden, there is no need to bring the open secret of slavery “close” to prove its extancy—it's already here, everywhere, in every subject, commodity, object-choice of the libido, and discourse, precisely in its unresolved absence.

The presentation builds on Garden’s 2024 exhibition at Timeshare, Los Angeles and continues their interrogations of the dramaturgy between the politics of desire, philosophies of property, and archival studies. For Garden, researching the artifacts and afterlives of slavery means contending with their imposed sequestration from Western notions of meaning, relation, and representation. Through an Afropessimist aesthetics of secrecy and performance, Garden presents the readymade objects of their practice as both indeterminate traces and banal spectacles of Atlantic slavery’s enduring effects.

The Virtual Estate of Elena Becher will be accompanied by a printed excerpt from Philosophy in the Bedroom and copies of their essay first presented in Berlin in 2024.

Boz Deseo Garden (b. 1997, Monterey, California, USA) lives and works in Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions include Timeshare, Los Angeles (2024); Petrine, Paris (2023); and Jargon Projects, Chicago (2022). Selected group exhibitions include Project Space, London (2025); Petrine, Paris (2025); Final Hot Desert, London (2024); Heidi, Berlin (2024); Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2023); and Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2022). They hold a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts, an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and are Program Director at the forthcoming Morning Star Research Center for the Afterlife of Slavery in Los Angeles.