Janiva Ellis Examines Violence in Modernity at Kunsthalle Basel

Janiva Ellis's exhibition 'Geneva' at Kunsthalle Basel features eleven new paintings that explore the history of violence in Western modernity. The show includes works such as 'Glint', an angel with Art Deco wings placed in the staircase, and 'May Day', a panoramic canvas depicting a rearing horse merging with a woman's body. Other paintings like 'Une nuit agitée' reimagine Walter Benjamin's Angel of History as a sexualized cartoon figure, while 'Philosophie Zoologique' references Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck's 1809 work. Ellis, born in 1989 in Oakland to a Black father and white mother, grew up in Hawaii. She told the New York Times that her work addresses the conditions of violence rather than Black identity per se, asking 'How can we as humans not oppress ourselves?' The exhibition runs in the same hall where the Basel Mission displayed objects from Accra in 1908.