Signals and Sentiments: A Conversation on Experimental Spaces for Art

A conversation on artist-run spaces and project-driven initiatives, expanding the spaces presented in the ‘Wall’ section of the fair. Moderated by Quinn Latimer, the discussion brings together Helena Papadopoulos, Radio Athènes, Athens, Niina Ulfsak, galerina, London, and Philémon Otth, sentiment, Zurich, to reflect on how such spaces evolve, how context shapes their direction, and which artistic and commercial models feel most relevant today.

Quinn Latimer heads the Fine Arts MA at Institute Art Gender Nature, at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW. She is a poet, critic, editor, and curator whose work considers literary and cinematic imaginaries and technologies as they are inscribed by issues of political desire, personal histories, and the social. She is the author of Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems (2017); Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance (2013); and Rumored Animals (2012). Latimer was editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14, in Athens and Kassel, and she is editor of SIREN (some poetics) (2024), and coeditor of Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology (2021) and The documenta 14 Reader (2017), among many other books.

Helena Papadopoulos studied Art History at the Courtauld Institute and Cultural Studies at the Royal College of Art in London. She is a curator, writer, and the founder of Radio Athènes. She thinks a lot about what her contemporaries make, but is also interested in flashbacks and eclipses, and in approaching exhibitions as unfinished projects, in the sense that everything is “to be continued” and take another form: a book, a record, a conversation, a trip, a friendship, another text.

Niina Ulfsak is a writer, curator, and co-founder of Galerina, London.Founded in 2022 in a bedroom in Homerton, Galerina builds a curatorial framework that supports socially engaged practices. The gallery’s programme brings together a multi-generational group of artists working across collaboration and experimental ways of exhibition-making.

Philémon Otth (b. 1991) was born and raised in Lausanne. He studied at HEAD Geneva before completing a Bachelor in Visual Arts at ZHdK in Zurich and a Master’s degree at FHNW–HGK in Basel. He has lived and worked in Zurich since 2013 and has exhibited in various cultural institutions and art spaces. He is a member of the artist collective Natalie Portman. In 2020, he co-founded the Zurich-based art space ‘sentiment’ with Olga Generalova, which became a gallery in November 2025.