Want to Find the Future of Art? Go to the Art Basel Awards
Art Basel has always been the art world's biggest flex. With 290 galleries and 90,000 visitors in attendance over the week, the 2026 edition of Basel did something more interesting than simply presenting today’s most exciting artworks. Through its programming and the Art Basel Awards, the art fair outright questioned whether the whole infrastructure of the contemporary art world actually still makes sense.
The Art Basel Awards, now in its second year, gathers medalists whose geographic positions are intrinsic to the work itself. Russian-born Aziza Kadyri combines suzani embroidery and soft sculpture with AI models and game engines to reframe Central Asian identity, whilst the Paris-based Carla Gueye, who is of Senegalese descent, uses lime and clay to excavate histories that have been, in her words, “partially confiscated, muted, or left unresolved.” Farah Al Qasimi works between Abu Dhabi and New York, creating photographs and films examining the hierarchies of emotion and information that structure life in both places.
This year, the Awards asked each medalist a deceptively simple question: What is the future of art? And the answers form somewhat of a manifesto when taken all together. Bangkok-born filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who has been creating experimental narrative cinema for 30 years, responded that "The future of art is in unlearning how we see." Per Nigerian-American poet and artist Precious Okoyomon, best known for creating entire environments with living kudzu vines inside gallery spaces as a metaphor for colonisation and ecological repair: "The future of art is miracles and endless desire." New York-based Tiffany Sia, who makes films about the legal and institutional structures that decide what's allowed to be visible, was precise in her response: "The future of art is entangled with the future of law." They also added a new category this year, the Gallery Legacy Award, which went to the historic Paula Cooper gallery. As part of the prize, they nominated Chapter NY to receive funding at next year’s Basel.
The Awards then put Icon and Emerging medalist in the same room, in a move to dismantle the set hierarchies of the art world. This year, the 2026 Icon medalists are three American women who use language to make political statements, long before most of the Emerging cohort was born. Barbara Kruger's endlessly iconic phrases, including "Your body is a battleground” and "I shop therefore I am," are so embedded in visual culture at this point that people quote them without knowing where they came from. Howardena Pindell was the first African American curator at MoMA, before building a practice that has spent six decades being formally rigorous and politically uncompromising at the same time. Jenny Holzer put language on LED tickers, projected it onto buildings, pasted it secretly onto subway walls, all the time insisting that reading in public is a shared, sometimes uncomfortable, embodied experience.
The other medalists included Aziza Kadyri, London-based and Uzbek by origin, who works across textiles, sculpture, creative technologies, and performance. Her practice is rooted in participatory community work and driven by themes of migration, displacement, feminism, and identity. Diego Marcon makes uncanny films, combining theoretical approaches to filmmaking with the sentimental pull of horror, comedy, and cartoons. His work has screened at the Venice Biennale, Cannes Directors' Fortnight, Rotterdam, and the BFI London Film Festival. In the Icon section, Arthur Jafa began his career as a cinematographer, before making some of the most formally explosive video art of the past decade. His 2016 work Love is the Message, The Message is Death was shown at institutions worldwide, and in 2019 he won the Golden Lion at Venice for The White Album. His work attempts to question how visual media can transmit the power, beauty, and alienation embedded in Black music. Julie Mehretu makes monumental paintings that read like aerial views, densely layered abstractions drawing on maps, architectural drawings, and the visual residue of political upheaval. Meanwhile, Rirkrit Tiravanija cooked Thai curry in a New York gallery in 1992 and redefined what art could be in the process. In his work Untitled (Free) at 303 Gallery, he moved the kitchen into the exhibition space, and served food to whoever showed up. Tiravanija then became the central figure of what the curator and critic Nicolas Bourriaud would call “relational aesthetics:” the idea that human relations and their social context could themselves be the material of art.
Another new development at this year’s fair was the Basel Exclusive. As part of this initiative, more e than 190 galleries held back significant works on their booth — no press previews, no listings, no advance photos — and unveiled them exclusively at the VIP opening. In a fair culture that runs substantially on pre-circulation, the idea that the first encounter with a work might still happen in person, unmediated, has otherwise been all but lost. Among the work unveiled at Basel Exclusive included 7 Objects in a Box, a work with seven sculptures by seven of the biggest pop artists of the time at Cristea Roberts; Louise Bourgeois's Untitled (2002) at Galerie Karsten Greve; Gerhard Richter's Silsersee at Sies + Höke; Andy Warhol's Troy (1962) at Acquavella; and Philip Guston's The Courtyard (1946) at Hauser & Wirth.
Making its European debut at this year's fair was the digital art platform Zero 10. Co-curated by digital strategist Eli Scheinman and artist Trevor Paglen under the theme The Condition, the platform brought together 20 galleries presenting digital, generative, AI-driven, and computational work as part of the initiative's biggest presentation yet. Visitors walked in to find John Gerrard's Western Flag, Flare (Oceania), and STANDARD shown as a triptych for the first time. The tension running through the space was rife with the efforts of artists and gallerists actively distancing themselves from prompt-based image generation in favour of code-based, system-driven work.
The Unlimited section of the fair, dedicated to large-scale works, always drums up anticipation over which monumental sculpture won't fit in a booth. This year saw a strong line-up of large-scale video and immersive environments by Goshka Macuga, Helen Marten, Wael Shawky and Luc Tuymans, amongst others. One of this year's participants was Marius Steiger, a 27-year-old-artist based in London and the youngest artist in Unlimited, who showed a monumental wall of life-size car paintings that turn the vehicle from a symbol of freedom and desire with Blue Velvet. His first institutional solo show in Asia opens later this year at a new museum in Shanghai designed by Tadao Ando.
Parcours, the public art sector of Basel, has always been designed to engage with the city itself — think Artworks in the streets, shopfronts, restaurant basements, breweries, squares, riverbanks, and public buildings. Highlights included drawings by the late Georgian artist Karlo Kacharava in a hotel reception overlooking The Rhine. And at the “Conversations” talks program, which is free and open throughout the fair, a record 3,600 people were drawn to a new auditorium in the Eventhalle. Audiences could listen in on one-on-one discussions with Awards medalists Arthur Jafa, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Farah Al Qasimi, Diego Marcon, Kulapat Yantrasast, and Precious Okoyomon; Aria Dean, Josh Kline, and novelist Hari Kunzru spoke on authorship and expertise in an AI world, while Jeremy Shaw and Nora N. Khan talked about how contemporary culture builds cathartic experience across art and music.
Art Basel has always been, among other things, a mirror held up to the art world's sense of itself — reflecting what it values, who it centers, which conversations it considers worth having. The Awards sharpen that function considerably by distributing recognition across Emerging and Icon classifications, thereby refusing the idea that influence is singular or hierarchical. By centering a cohort with genuine geographic depth and disciplinary porousness, the fair makes an argument about where the most compelling work is happening and who is doing it.
The 2026 Art Basel Awards medalists were recognized during Art Basel's flagship fair in Basel, Switzerland, in June 2026. Gold Awardees will be announced at the Official Art Basel Awards Night during Art Basel Miami Beach later this year.
