Extrasensory exhibition – New York artist Chloe Wise lands her first major Swiss institutional show with Extrasensory, a free, immersive film installation questioning persuasion, fantasy, and the limits of perception.
Chloe Wise is preparing her first major institutional appearance in Switzerland this summer, and the setting—Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger in Basel—signals a milestone moment for an artist whose work often lives between screens, symbols, and belief.
Her upcoming exhibition, **“Extrasensory,”** opens **12 June** and runs until **6 September 2026**, curated by Samuel Leuenberger.. It’s built around what Wise calls the most ambitious film project of her career so far. presented through a large-scale immersive installation that doesn’t simply “show” a story.. Instead, it stages an experience of being addressed—visually and psychologically—by images that feel at once seductive and destabilizing.
At the centre is a multichannel video work that unfolds across a constellation of large screens.. Seven archetypal figures emerge as embodiments of mystical and metaphysical phenomena. inhabiting roles that deliberately blur the boundaries between belief systems and cultural scripts.. Wise’s visual language. already recognizable from her painting practice through its iconography and crafted surfaces. translates here into a cinematic register—one that echoes the look and rhythm of late twentieth-century film.. The effect is intentionally heightened: not an escape into fantasy. but a closer look at how fantasy is produced. circulated. and accepted.
That tension sits inside the exhibition’s editorial core.. Leuenberger frames the show as a critique of persuasion. fantasy. and mass imagery. describing it as an insistence on ambiguity as a form of resistance—particularly at a moment when “forced clarity” can feel like a cultural demand.. In other words, Extrasensory isn’t offering a single answer for what its images mean.. It treats uncertainty as the point.. And that approach matters in a media environment where we’re often pushed toward immediate interpretations. emotional reactions. and “takeaways” rather than sustained attention.
Immersive film as a test of perception
Wise’s shift in Extrasensory is subtle but significant: the exhibition doesn’t just depict phenomena; it turns toward the conditions of perception itself.. The installation lingers on moments where perception and language begin to falter, suggesting that understanding isn’t automatic.. When viewers move through an immersive, multichannel environment, the usual contract—sit, watch, interpret—is disturbed.. The images don’t merely represent belief; they pressure the viewer’s interpretive habits.
For audiences, that can land as a kind of double experience.. You might feel pulled in by the work’s visual confidence—its theatrical archetypes. its cinematic cadence—while simultaneously sensing that the work is watching back.. This is where Wise’s artistic obsession becomes visible: subjectivity is not treated as a private internal space. but as something constructed through images and cultural codes.. In a public setting like a Basel institutional exhibition, that idea has social weight.. It implies that our “inner” sense of reality is continuously shaped by external visual systems.
Why ambiguity reads like resistance now
If there’s a reason Extrasensory feels timely. it’s because the cultural logic Leuenberger points to—forced clarity—has accelerated across platforms. headlines. and comment culture.. The demand for crisp meanings can reduce complex experiences into slogans.. Wise’s refusal to tidy up the imagery, then, becomes more than an aesthetic preference.. It becomes an attitude toward how people process the world when information moves fast and interpretation is rewarded.
At the same time, the exhibition’s free admission model changes the stakes of access.. Art that challenges perception can sometimes feel gated by cost or cultural fluency.. By keeping the show itself free, Kulturstiftung Basel H.. Geiger lowers barriers—inviting not just art audiences. but a wider public to encounter an immersive work that asks viewers to slow down and tolerate ambiguity.
An artist book extends the spell beyond the screens
The exhibition will be accompanied by an artist book published by Hatje Cantz. with contributions from scientists and artists. and made available free of charge to visitors.. That detail matters because it suggests the project won’t remain trapped inside the installation’s spatial effects.. Instead. it extends into a portable form—paper as another medium for thinking about the same questions: how language behaves under uncertainty. how cultural archetypes become legible. and how “extrasensory” ideas travel through imagery.
What makes the pairing compelling is its disciplinary openness.. Scientists and artists don’t automatically share the same methods. but putting their voices alongside Wise’s filmic world hints at a broader cultural inquiry into perception—one that doesn’t collapse the metaphysical into entertainment.. It invites readers to hold multiple frameworks at once. which is another way of resisting the pressure to choose a single lens.
For Basel. and for Wise’s practice. Extrasensory reads as an institutional leap—her first major Swiss appearance at a prominent cultural foundation.. Yet it doesn’t look like a compromise toward clarity.. The exhibition arrives with a deliberate refusal to resolve.. In the end. that’s the most honest promise the show can make: not that viewers will leave with a definitive explanation. but that they will notice the mechanisms behind how explanations are manufactured.
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