"What do ghosts smell like? Should we fear them? Do they talk or are they limited to wails and the occasional shriek? These questions and more are pondered in Ghosts: Visualising the Supernatural at Kunstmuseum Basel, a spooky and consistently curious exhibition that unpicks our obsession with spirits loitering in limbo and shows how artists, pseudoscientists, conmen and enthusiasts have imagined them over the past two-and-a-half centuries."
"Ghosts have morphed from being creepy cameos in fireside tales to the star act. The exhibition opens with a montage of clips from cinematic chillers from the slime-spewing wraiths of Ghostbusters to the unsettled phantoms of the Spanish civil war in The Devil's Backbone. European auteurs have a particular fondness for apparitions and manifestations. Recently, 2023's All of Us Strangers blended a ghost story with a London-set gay love story."
"There are many varying ghost traditions in the world, and we specifically chose to focus on the western hemisphere in the past 250 years, says Eva Reifert, Kunstmuseum's curator of 19th century and modern art, who has orchestrated this deep dive into the spirit world. You could do ghost exhibitions in other parts of the world and get very different ghosts haunting the halls."
An exhibition at Kunstmuseum Basel traces two-and-a-half centuries of ghost imagery and belief across the western hemisphere. Ghosts have shifted from cameo figures in fireside tales to central narrative forces in film and art. Victorian interest combined fervent belief with a demand for documentary proof, prompting psychic studies to interact with traditional science and emerging technologies such as photography and sound recording. Twentieth-century approaches increasingly privileged artistic interpretation over purported evidence. Film clips illustrate the range from comic slime-spewing wraiths to melancholic civil-war phantoms, while curatorial choices foreground diverse traditions and the malleable identities of apparitions.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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