Nina Porter
Liste Art Fair Basel
10–16 June 2024
Preview: Monday 10 June, 11 am–6 pm


For Liste 2024, Nina Porter shows new sculptures, photographs and films with which she continues to dismantle and reconstitute the camera and its processes. The presentation follows her January exhibition, vision on the run.

The exhibition comprised a pair of pinhole cameras and the photographs resulting from them. These works were characterised by their interiority, the cameras determined by the dimensions of Porter’s bathroom and positioned so as to observe, from various vantages, the domestic scenarios of her apartment in Frankfurt’s Bahnhofsviertel.

By installing a new pair of cameras in public contexts, Porter now turns their attentions to the outside. Their scales modified towards inconspicuousness, the cameras operate between concentration and distraction, producing long-exposure images with scattered, quasi-omniscient perspectives. The presentation includes 6 photographs resulting from these scenarios. They show starry glimpses of an aisle in Müller or the arcade at Hauptwache, but the specificity of these locations is subdued by the perspectival glut, the referents dissociated and the pictorial anchors roving. Like those in Porter’s exhibition, the new photographs are presented in Perspex frames, each one holding both the positive print and the negative—the latter obscured behind the former (there is, again, one exception). This multi-directionality echoes that of the image.

The two cameras—one black and one white—lean in the corner of the booth, relegated now to the status of a sculpture. Alongside these cameras and photographs, Porter introduces a parallel series of experimental films, Human Puncture. Each one trains her 16mm camera on a crowd or assembly, yet the individual faces are barely differentiated from the mass. Like the earlier work, Rehearsal (2023), the new films are constructed using a complex matting system which builds an atomised image, one that is gradually consumed by and overridden with its own information. As the picture surges, matter becomes equalised and dissolves.

The presentation is accompanied by a new publication, Human Puncture.

Installation view
Camera 5, 2024
Plaster polymer, fibreglass, 46 tin pin holes, clasps, plywood, enamel paint, pencil, wax, gouache, felt, fabric masking case
150 x ø 12 cm
59 x ø 4 3/4 in
AS-PORTN-0021
Camera 5, 2024 [detail]
Plaster polymer, fibreglass, 46 tin pin holes, clasps, plywood, enamel paint, pencil, wax, gouache, felt, fabric masking case
150 x ø 12 cm
59 x ø 4 3/4 in
AS-PORTN-0021
SPR10WC5080524, 2024
C-type negative and C-type contact print in artist’s frame
143 x 18.8 x 2.2 cm
56 1/4 x 7 3/8 x 7/8 in
AS-PORTN-0023
SPR10WC5080524, 2024 [detail]
C-type negative and C-type contact print in artist’s frame
143 x 18.8 x 2.2 cm
56 1/4 x 7 3/8 x 7/8 in
AS-PORTN-0023
SPR16W20BC6140524, 2024
C-type contact print and C-type negative in artist’s frame
143 x 18.8 x 2.2 cm
56 1/4 x 7 3/8 x 7/8 in
AS-PORTN-0024
SPR16W20BC6140524, 2024 [detail]
C-type contact print and C-type negative in artist’s frame
143 x 18.8 x 2.2 cm
56 1/4 x 7 3/8 x 7/8 in
AS-PORTN-0024
Installation view
SPR7W4445WC5240424, 2024
C-type contact print and C-type negative in artist’s frame
143 x 18.8 x 2.2 cm
56 1/4 x 7 3/8 x 7/8 in
AS-PORTN-0025
Camera 6, 2024
Plaster polymer, fibreglass, 22 tin pin holes, clasps, U nails, pigment, plywood, enamel paint, pencil, wax, gouache, felt, fabric masking case
150 x ø 12 cm
59 x ø 4 3/4 in
AS-PORTN-0022
Camera 6, 2024 [detail]
Plaster polymer, fibreglass, 22 tin pin holes, clasps, U nails, pigment, plywood, enamel paint, pencil, wax, gouache, felt, fabric masking case
150 x ø 12 cm
59 x ø 4 3/4 in
AS-PORTN-0022
SPR3WC5220424, 2024
C-type contact print and C-type negative in artist’s frame
143 x 18.8 x 2.2 cm
56 1/4 x 7 3/8 x 7/8 in
AS-PORTN-0026
SPR3WC5220424, 2024 [detail]
C-type contact print and C-type negative in artist’s frame
143 x 18.8 x 2.2 cm
56 1/4 x 7 3/8 x 7/8 in
AS-PORTN-0026
SPR8W612WC5070524, 2024
C-type contact print and C-type negative in artist’s frame
143 x 18.8 x 2.2 cm
56 1/4 x 7 3/8 x 7/8 in
AS-PORTN-0027
SPR8W612WC5070524, 2024 [detail]
C-type contact print and C-type negative in artist’s frame
143 x 18.8 x 2.2 cm
56 1/4 x 7 3/8 x 7/8 in
AS-PORTN-0027
SPR9W376BC6070524, 2024
C-type contact print and C-type negative in artist’s frame
143 x 18.8 x 2.2 cm
56 1/4 x 7 3/8 x 7/8 in
AS-PORTN-0028
Human Puncture (burial), 2024
16mm film transferred to HD
00:04:23
AS-PORTN-0029
Installation view
Human Puncture (cycle), 2024
16mm film transferred to HD
00:02:59
AS-PORTN-0030
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