New York-based artist Chloe Wise will be making her first major institutional appearance in Switzerland this summer, with a new exhibition at the Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger. The show Extrasensory, open from 12 June to 6 September 2026, is curated by Samuel Leuenberger and centres on the most ambitious film project of Wise’s career to date, presented within a large-scale immersive installation.
At the heart of the exhibition is a multichannel video work presented across a constellation of large screens, through which seven archetypes emerge as embodiments of mystical and metaphysical phenomena. The figures inhabit exaggerated roles that blur belief systems, and cultural archetypes, drawing visually on the iconography of Wise’s painting practice while echoing the aesthetics of late twentieth century film. The result is a seductive and unsettling register that the exhibition frames as a critique of persuasion, fantasy and mass imagery. As curator Leuenberger puts it, the show “insists on ambiguity as a form of resistance” at a time of what he calls forced clarity.
The exhibition extends Wise’s longstanding interrogation of how subjectivity is constructed through images and cultural codes, shifting here toward the conditions of perception itself. Rather than defining the phenomena it depicts, Extrasensory lingers in moments where, as Leuenberger notes, “perception and language begin to falter.”
An artist book published by Hatje Cantz, with contributions from scientists and artists, will be produced alongside the exhibition and made available free of charge to visitors. Admission to the exhibition itself is also free.
