Paulina Caspari München

For Liste Art Fair Basel 2026 Belgian artist Vincent Scheers presents a body of work examining what happens when technologies designed for permanence meet forces of transformation. Working with discarded film stock, decaying metals, and natural specimens, Scheers stages encounters between objects caught in rapid cycles of obsolescence and processes operating across evolutionary timescales. Materials transform into landscapes, and the tools used to measure the world become the world itself.

Scheers‘s works trace feedback loops of production and decay. Objects move through usage, technical obsolescence, and global resale platforms, only to be repurposed with a great effort that has hauntingly unconscious undertones. His juxtapositions reveal temporal paradoxes of organic forms shaped by millions of years of evolution encountering industrial materials, some of them already halfway obsolete. Both carry informational weight as accumulated evolutionary data or containing traces of rapid technological innovation. Where nature operates across geological time, technology mutates at a raging pace. The planned presentation would explore how material collections and archives mutate when subjected to natural forces. His works propose scenarios where distinctions between scientific instruments, historical artifacts, and organic matter dissolve, suggesting that human systems of categorization and preservation ultimately submit to broader processes of transformation. The interplay between controlled display structures and uncontrolled biological processes would create feedback loops where the apparatus of presentation itself becomes subject to decay.

Central to the presentation is the question of what happens when documentation rejoins the world it once captured. Scheers works with archival materials, like obsolete film technologies, that undergo biochemical transformation. As these materials decompose, their informational weight shifts: what once carried visual data becomes landscape itself. The archive doesn‘t represent nature; it returns to it, subject to the same forces it was designed to observe and record. Here, decay operates not as metaphor but as active chemistry. Following Reza Negarestani‘s insight that decay is „pre-established universal chemistry“ starting from within before becoming visible on surfaces, Scheers mobilizes bacteria, fungi, oxidation, and erosion as collaborators. Nature works patiently, indifferent to human timelines of preservation or control. Throughout the presentation, Scheers stages encounters between technological exhaustion and natural persistence. His works propose that in an age where human production has become geological in scale, the fundamental relationship between culture and nature requires reconsideration as human systems of control dissolve into larger cycles of decay and renewal.

Vincent Scheers (b.1990) is a belgian artist living and working in Munich, whose mediums span painting, printmaking and sculpture. Scheers studied printmaking and fine Art at the Royal Academy of Antwerp. In 2023 he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In 2024, he was awarded the prestigious ars viva prize, granted annually to outstanding young artists by the Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e.V. The prize is associated with exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bremen (Bremen, DE, 2024), Haus der Kunst (Munich, DE, 2025), and an artist’s residency on Fogo Island (CA) in 2026.

In line with the philosophers’ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s idea that “art begins with the animal,”the point of departure of Scheers’s artistic practice begins with human-animal relations. At times, his art even sets animals, plants and microorganisms in opposition to the human world by subjecting them to the logic of manmade systems. Philosophic paradigms on power and discipline inform Scheers’s research. A key thesis of his artistic practice thus posits that refracting institutionalized power through interspecies relations, exposes society’s prioritization of control over care.

Recent solo exhibitions include This and Thatness at Anton Janizewski (Berlin, DE, 2025), The History of the Criminal at Sharp Projects (Copenhagen, DK, 2023), Grooming at Paulina Caspari (Munich, DE, 2023), Natural access at Lucky (Peripheral Alliances by Kunstverein München, Inning am Ammersee, DE, 2021), Auf ewig zum spucken verdammt/ Doomed to spit forever at Kunstverein Global Forest (St. Georgen, DE, 2020), MAST at Forbidden City (Antwerp, BE, 2019) and A blind man crossing at Jos Joos (Brussels, BE, 2018).
Recent selected (institutional) group exhibitions include ars viva 2025. Where will we land? at Haus der Kunst (Munich, DE, 2025), This Soft Life at Paulina Caspari (Munich, DE, 2025), Ars Viva 2025 at Kunsthalle Bremen (Bremen, DE, 2024), Pivô Pesquisa at Pivô Residency center (Sao Paulo, BR, 2024) and Fragrant Tissues at beacon (Munich, DE, 2023).