Helvetia Art Prize

We are delighted to welcome Helvetia Art Prize as Featured Guest at Liste. This year, the prize presents the work of 2024 award winner Virginie Sistek (*1999).

Sistek, a graduate of the master’s program in Fine Arts at the Institute Art Nature Gender, HGK Basel, explores structures of social power and their subtle mechanisms of control, adaptation, and submission. Her installations, performances, and videos examine processes of domestication—not only in a literal sense but also within social systems and interpersonal dynamics. She is particularly interested in questions of consensus, the automatisms of self-legitimation, and strategies of resistance. Her work is distinguished by a sharp narrative sensibility, balancing social relevance with a subversive sense of humour.

Sistek convinced the 2024 Helvetia Art Prize jury with her large-scale installation Resurrection Ranch, which critically engages with the domestication and exploitation of female horses in the blood farm industry—where mares are kept in near-constant pregnancy to extract hormones used in both livestock farming and human medicine.

The Helvetia Art Prize, awarded since 2004, is a vital launchpad for graduates of Swiss art schools. With a prize money of CHF 15,000 and a solo exhibition at Liste, it provides targeted support for emerging artistic positions. Previous prize winners who have exhibited at Liste include Bisso Yann Stéphane (2023), Jonas Van Holanda (2022), Anita Mucolli (2021), Tiphanie Kim Mall (2020), Kaspar Ludwig (2019), and Gina Proenza (2018).

Spine Book Forum

As Featured Guest of Liste 2025, the Spine Book Forum—curated by Distanz—presents over 100 new books from 30 publishers in the fields of literature, theory, architecture, film, and contemporary art as part of Liste Art Fair Basel.

Initiated in 2022 by Distanz as a collaborative and cross-disciplinary book market, Spine has since fostered dialogue among specialist publishers at various contemporary art venues.

Distanz is an international art book publisher based in Berlin, producing books on contemporary art, art theory, photography, architecture, and design.

Wall

Through its newly designed architecture, the fair introduces Wall as part of the Featured Guests of Liste 2025, providing a dedicated platform for project spaces and artist-run spaces for the first time.

This year, The Wig, Berlin, Galerina, London, and Institut Funder Bakke, Silkeborg, have been invited to use the designated walls for specially curated experimental projects.