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<\/p>\nShuang Li has spent much of the past decade probing the strange intimacies of digital life: the way screens mediate desire and belonging, and how algorithmic systems seep into and reflect the everyday experience. Her installations, videos, interactive websites and performances blur autobiography with collective fantasy, weaving together things like emo fandom and role play to explore the ways in which identity fragments and circulates online. Her exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel marks the artist\u2019s first institutional solo show in Europe. In a presentation both atmospheric and ominous, Li narrows her focus to a niche corner of social media: storm-chasing videos.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a particular quality in Shuang Li\u2019s work that I find hard to look away from,\u201d says Mohamed Almusibli, the director and chief curator of Kunsthalle Basel. \u201cShe doesn\u2019t illustrate ideas about technology and media; she makes us, the viewers, feel their texture. The weight, the noise, the way attention gets pulled in ten directions at once.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shaped by internet culture<\/p>\n
Born in 1990 in China and now based in both Berlin and Geneva, Li trained in media studies at New York University before emerging as a distinct voice among a generation of artists shaped equally by internet culture and global mobility. Alliance is centred on a major new film installation examining the obsessive and dangerous pursuit of tornadoes, hurricanes and extreme meteorological events across vast territories. \u201cWhat stays with me is how much of this work was discovered rather than planned,\u201d Almusibli says, explaining that Li first encountered storm-chasing by watching live-streamed videos on TikTok of strangers driving into tornadoes.<\/p>\n
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Shuang Li: \u201casking questions about the systems we move through every day\u201d Courtesy of the artist<\/p>\n
Li explains that she was, \u201cinstantly\u00a0hit by the romanticism\u2026 ultimately chasing nothing but wind\u201d. She began watching the videos obsessively. \u201cI started to see a parallel between the physical landscape where tornadoes form and the media landscape itself,\u201d she says. \u201cTornadoes usually emerge over extremely flat land, just like the flattened media landscape we are situated in today. After that, I couldn\u2019t stop seeing the resemblance everywhere\u2014little vortices constantly forming, each one trying to pull you in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Indeed, for Li, storms and the dangerous practice of chasing them became metaphors for contemporary existence within global networks shaped simultaneously by climate instability, surveillance technologies and capitalist extraction.<\/p>\n
The conceptual triad of ecology, data infrastructure and human desire is central to the exhibition. In unpacking these themes, Li resists straightforward critique in favour of something more psychologically slippery. Screens, platforms and digital systems appear not only as mechanisms of control but as spaces onto which people project fantasies of connection and intimacy.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe work doesn\u2019t ask you to observe from a safe distance,\u201d Almusibli says. \u201cIt pulls you into it, manipulates your sense of speed and space until the tornado feels less like something approaching from the horizon and more like something already forming from within. That, for me, is the emotional core of the exhibition. Not catastrophe as subject\u00a0matter, but catastrophe as the only honest description of how we already live.\u201d<\/p>\n
The work doesn\u2019t ask you to observe from a safe distance\u2014it pulls you into it <\/p>\n
Mohamed Almusibli, curator<\/p>\n
Avoiding falling into either dystopian clich\u00e9 or hypercriticism, Li\u2019s work remains unexpectedly tender. Her installations recognise that even within corrupt or chaotic systems, people continue searching for forms of communion.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope our visitors leave slightly disoriented in a productive way; not confused, but recalibrated,\u201d Almusibli says. \u201cShuang is asking questions about the systems we move through every day without noticing: digital media, information flows, the infrastructures of attention. She is pointing towards the sense of being permanently mid-storm. That resonates deeply right now. More than anything, I hope the show creates a space for reflection that prompts people to question what it means to navigate the world we live in today.\u201d<\/p>\n