For the 2026 edition of Art Basel, Silverlens enters the prestigious Galleries sector for the first time while concurrently activating the Parcours sector with a presentation of four intergenerational Southeast Asian women artists: Geraldine Javier, Yee I-Lann, Nicole Coson, and Pacita Abad. For each artist, materials exceed themselves: 267 paintings hide inside a volcano's silhouette, a woven mat becomes a counter to the colonial table, a shipping container becomes a printing tool, and tablecloth becomes a painting. A five-minute walk from the fair, Nicole Coson presents a suspended installation of aluminum-cast oyster shells as part of the Parcours sector for public art. Curated by Stefanie Hessler, Director of the Swiss Institute in New York, Parcours is Art Basel's public art sector where installations are spread throughout the city of Basel. Located in the basement of the KLARA food court, a five minute walk from the main fair, Nicole Coson exhibits Some place, within here (2024), a towering installation featuring aluminum-cast Aklan oyster shells threaded between interlocking metal loops hanging from the ceiling. The work explicitly mimics the structures used to aquafarm oysters in Aklan, a Visayan province in the Philippines, where these mollusks are cultivated on bamboo grids, dangling beneath the ocean's surface. As they age, the undercurrent leaves its record in rings on their shells, place and time made physical. The location is not incidental: KLARA is a food court where international cuisines meet, a daily enactment of the same movement of food and culture that Coson's work traces. The installation arrives in Basel following its presentation in Thresholds of Becoming, the 40th anniversary exhibition of esea contemporary, the UK's leading East and Southeast Asian art institution, where Coson was one of six invited artists exhibited.

ABOUT ARTISTS : Geraldine Javier,Yee I-Lann,Nicole Coson,Pacita Abad

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Geraldine Javier (b. 1970, Makati City; lives and works in Batangas, Philippines) presents Mt. Maculot. "All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you." (Octavia E. Butler) (2025), a volcanic silhouette of 267 eco-printed and embroidered paintings crafted over six months by 11 community members. Arranged like books in a closed library, the pieces reveal only their spines, standing alongside collaged tapestries from her Shades of Grey series (2025) that similarly blend her community-employment practice. Following her presentation in Encounters at Art Basel Hong Kong earlier this year, this Galleries sector debut precedes a major New York solo exhibition this September 2026. Yee I-Lann (b. 1971, Sabah, Malaysia; lives in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia) debuts a new series of tikar (woven mats) made collaboratively with the Dusun and Murut weavers of Sabah. Rooted in Southeast Asian history, the mat serves as an egalitarian, floor-level space for gathering that functions as a direct form of political resistance against the hierarchical power of the colonial table. Featuring woven pixels of boxes that reference Conway's Game of Life computer simulation, these new works use the imagery of containment to explore inheritance, decentralization, and the artist's call to "unfold the box" into a mat that holds everyone. Having achieved extensive global institutional recognition for her pioneering practice, her collaborative woven works and digital photomontages are held in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, UAE. Nicole Coson (b. 1992, Manila; lives and works in London) presents quiet paintings created by using her own body to press real, inked shipping container doors onto raw canvas. Her smaller works are printed from plastic crates used to transport exoticized vegetables through London's markets, transferring the photographic texture and weight of global trade vessels onto fabric. The industrial surfaces and physical pressure embedded in these works extend into her concurrent Parcours installation at Klara, located a short walk from the fair, marking the artist's debut at Basel. Pacita Abad (b. 1946, Batanes, Philippines; d. 2004, Singapore) is presented through Anemone (1992), featuring the vivid kencana flower, alongside a group of her 1990s Indonesian floral paintings in original Balinese wooden frames, shown in Europe for the first time. These works are paired with Baguio Fruit (1981), a tribute to the Philippine highlands and the very first trapunto (hand-quilted canvas) the artist ever made. Included in the artist's retrospective originating at the Walker Art Center and reproduced in her award-winning monograph, the work holds a pivotal place within Abad's practice and career. Having garnered immense international acclaim, Abad's pioneering works are part of major global institutional collections, including Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); and M+, Hong Kong.

Milano Straps

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