Spellbound
Brought together by Paris-based curator and writer Juliette Desorgues for Liste Art Fair Basel 2026, this programme comprises artists’ moving-image works selected from proposals submitted by participating galleries.
Spanning a range of genres and narrative registers, the works inhabit the precarious threshold between fiction, fantasy and reality, unsettling dominant constructions of the real while envisioning alternative worlds into being. In tracing the porous boundary between the imagined and the lived, the works presented consider what kinds of futures, fears, desires, and forms of freedom emerge when reality itself begins to feel unstable.
With works by (in order of appearance): Valentina Vaccarella (sentiment, Zurich), Augustine Paredes (Paulina Caspari, Munich), Jihye Rhii (Galerie Khoshbakht, Cologne), Lizzy Deacon (243 Luz & Co, London/Margate), Tornike Gognadze (Commune, Vienna), Kumar Muniandy & Madalina Zaharia (with poetry by Avrina) (Ivan, Bucharest), Zazou Roddam (Brunette Coleman, London).
The Film Programme is kindly supported by Vidi Square.
Valentina Vaccarella
Baby I am Mount Everest, 2025, 09 min 08 sec
presented by sentiment, Zurich
Baby I am Mount Everest (2025) centres on porn star Annette Schwarz as she narrates her own fantasies. Oscillating between the absurd and the intimate, her words — at times confessional, funny, and self-mythologizing — construct a portrait of desire as a mode of self-fashioning. The video questions the mechanics of attention, obsession, and notoriety, staging a dialogue between personal narrative and performative identity while exposing the fragility of ego in the digital age.
Valentina Vaccarella, Baby I am Mount Everest, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and sentiment.
Augustine Paredes
GOOD GOD BAD BOY, 2026, 09 min 20 sec
presented by Paulina Caspari, Munich
GOOD GOD BAD BOY (2026) unfolds as a stream of consciousness — a fever dream spiralling toward decadence through fragments of queer desperation. Borrowing narratives from the Pacific War and verses from the Song of Solomon, the work traces resonances between histories of conflict, desire, and dissolution within the contemporary queer chemsex scene.
Augustine Paredes, GOOD GOD BAD BOY, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Paulina Caspari.
Jihye Rhii
earth milk: spoken in red, 2025, 15 min 39 sec
presented by Galerie Khoshbakht, Cologne
earth milk: spoken in red (2025) traces memory, ancestry, and ritual through the layered lives of three female figures: the mother, the grandmother, and Mago, the Korean creator goddess often imagined as an ancestral grandmother. Drawing on myth, folklore, field recordings, 8mm film, and digital footage, the work weaves together personal and collective histories. It explores the unstable relation between image and sound: produced independently, the two are played back out of sync, creating new constellations of meanings with each iteration.
Jihye Rhii, earth milk: spoken in red, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Khoshbakht
Lizzy Deacon
Heavenly Beauty, 2025, 12 min 55 sec
presented by 243 Luz & Co, London/Margate
Heavenly Beauty (2025) traces the artist’s attendance at an exclusive high-net-worth networking gala where ultra-wealthy adults indulge childhood fantasies by assuming the roles of princes and princesses. Arriving alone, Deacon films herself and her surroundings as she navigates this surreal social world. Moving between performance, observation, and self-documentation, the work explores intimacy, fantasy, class, and aspiration as the artist attempts to infiltrate the carefully staged milieu.
Lizzy Deacon, Heavenly Beauty, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and 243 Luz & Co
Tornike Gognadze
BOOM BALL, 2025, 20 min 28 sec
presented by Commune, Vienna
BOOM BALL (2025), Gognadze’s debut short film, draws on personal stories reworked into a fictional script. The work engages not only with the fallibility of human memory, but also with the social and political ramifications of collective amnesia — phenomena often described as the “Mandela Effect.” Through two protagonists confronted by the instability of their own recollections, the film gradually unravels the fragile boundary between personal anecdote and collective memory.
Tornike Gognadze, BOOM BALL, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Commune.
Kumar Muniandy and Madalina Zaharia (with poetry by அவ்ரீனா Avrina)
Unfortunately_Wonderful_Difficult, 2025, 17 min 23 sec
presented by Ivan, Bucharest
Unfortunately_Wonderful_Difficult (2025) unfolds within a sparsely furnished apartment gradually overtaken by its inhabitant’s emotional life: feelings of inadequacy take over the kitchen, muted anger stains the walls, and gestures of performed healing settle into the living room. The work follows O who attempts to map the unpredictable actions that structure his ascetic living and studio space. He is seen turning strips of green tape into a score for repetitive rituals and every day ceremonies. Slowly, a cartography of queer desire, ancestral grievance, and buried rage emerges, transforming solitude into a restorative practice of dramatic intention.
Kumar Muniandy and Madalina Zaharia (with poetry by அவ்ரீனா Avrina), Unfortunately_Wonderful_Difficult, 2025. Courtesy of the artists and Ivan Gallery
Zazou Roddam
Pop Inflection (The City), 2022-2023, 07 min 40 sec
presented by Brunette Coleman, London
Pop Inflection (The City) (2022–2023) reconstructs segments from the television series ‘Sex and the City’ (1998–2004). Stripped of its iconic quartet of protagonists, the video focuses instead on a montage of New York streetscapes and urban details extracted from the series. Sequenced chronologically, these fragments trace subtle transformations within the metropolis over time. Accompanied by an original score by Luca Mantero, the work unfolds as a phantasmagoric meditation on memory and time.
Zazou Roddam, Pop Inflection (The City), 2022-2023. Courtesy of the artist and Brunette Coleman
Juliette Desorgues is a curator and writer based in Paris. With a background in art history and theory from the University of Edinburgh, the University of Vienna, and University College London, she has worked internationally as a curator both independently and within institutions. From 2019 to 2021 she served as Curator at MOSTYN, Llandudno, Wales and from 2013 to 2017 as Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. She has also held curatorial roles at the Barbican Art Gallery, London and Generali Foundation, Vienna. As a writer she has published widely, for monographs as well as publications including Art Basel Stories, Art Monthly, Frieze, Mousse and Spike. She sits on the Board of the Jacqueline de Jong Foundation.
Valentina Vaccarella (b. 1993, New York; lives and works in New York) works across painting, photography, and found materials. Her practice looks at how public image, fame and power are constructed, with a focus on the distance between lived experience and public perception. Celebrity culture, media narratives, and public judgment play a central role in this work, which often brings together materials linked to tradition or status with images drawn from popular culture.
Augustine Paredes (b. 1994, Cagayan de Oro City, Philippines) is a multi-disciplinary artist questioning what it means to desire in the light of migration, identity, and longing. His expanded photographic practice revolves and evolves in questioning the postcolonial identity of a Filipino in diaspora through different appropriation of artistic mediums, traditional materials, queer gaze, and historical narratives. Paredes works with image-making via photography, painting, poetry, performance, and installation. His work has been exhibited at institutions and galleries such as Museum Wiesbaden (Wiesbaden, DE, 2025); Fotografieforum Frankfurt (Frankfurt am Main, DE, 2025); Paulina Caspari, (Munich, DE, 2025); Jameel Arts Centre, (Dubai, UAE, 2024); Leaks at Foundry, (Dubai, UAE, 2023); Fffriedrich, (Frankfurt am Main, DE, 2023); Gulf Photo Plus, (Dubai, UAE, 2022); and Today x Future, (Quezon City, PH, 2016).
Jihye Rhii (b. 1992, Seoul, KR) lives and works in Düsseldorf. In 2022, she completed her studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Prof. Trisha Donnelly. Her work has been presented, among others, at Bio Gallery, Seoul (2026); Galerie Khoshbakht, Cologne (2025); Filmwerkstatt Düsseldorf (2025); Rinde am Rhein, Düsseldorf (2023; 2025); Museum Kurhaus Kleve (2024); Prosopopoeia, Vienna (2024); Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2024); and Draakoni Gallery, Tallinn (2023).
Lizzy Deacon (b.1999, UK) is an Amsterdam-based artist. Rooted in a framework of portraiture, Deacon’s practice explores social dynamics, systems and displays of value and class in contemporary life. Working predominantly in moving image, drawing and performance, Deacon develops long-term, character-driven investigations, drawing on the specific behaviours and individual histories of the real people she interacts with, both in physical environments and online spaces. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including Bozar, Brussels (2026); Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, (2025); Mascara Film Club, Amsterdam (2025); Cubitt Gallery, London (2024); 243 Luz, Margate (2024); The Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan (2022); Museum Ludwig, Cologne, (2022); the Millennium Film Workshop, New York (2022); LUX Moving Image, London, (2018). Deacon studied at De Ateliers in Amsterdam and holds a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Tornike Gognadze (b. 1999, Tbilisi, Georgia) is an artist currently based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. From 2018 to 2020, Gognadze studied at the Visual Arts, Architecture & Design School at The University of Tbilisi. Since 2021, he has been studying at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, where he continues to develop a sculptural language rooted in personal experience and critical reflection often engaging with the emotional, social, and political landscape of the post-Soviet region. Recent solo exhibitions include: ‘Radar’ at Westfälischer Kunstverein, Munich, DE; ‘Forever Spin’ at Opelvillen Rüsselsheim, DE and ‘The Dream’ at fffriedrich, Frankfurt am Main, DE. His work has also been included in group exhibitions across Georgia, Germany, and the UK, including presentations at the HETEROTOPIA International London Art Festival, and the Tbilisi Biennale. He is a permanent participant in the Sculpture Park at the Ria Keburia Foundation in Kachreti, GE.
Mădălina Zaharia (b.1985) is a Romanian artist and filmmaker who lives and works in London. She received a BA in Photography and Video from the National University of the Arts, Bucharest/Romania (2008) and an MA in Printmaking from the Royal College of Art, London (2012).
Her films have been shown at festivals including the BFI London Film Festival 2023, SQIFF 2021 (Scottish Queer International Film Festival) in Glasgow/Scotland and GRRL HAUS CINEMA 2021 in Boston, MA/USA. Her film Public Figure (made in collaboration with poet and performer Ryan Ormonde) was awarded the prize for Best Film at the Bucharest International Dance Film Festival 2021.
Zazou Roddam (b. 2000, London) lives and works in London. Recent exhibitions include: Sunset Strip, Further Down The Line, Liverpool (2026), BedRock, Casa Flash Art, Otsuni (2025), GMT, Hot Wheels Athens, Athens (2025), Great Works, Galerie Oskar Weiss, Zürich (2025), Does Anyone Still Wear a Hat?, Hans Goodrich, Chicago (2024), pretend it's a city, Chess Club, Hamburg (2024), Pop Inflection, Brunette Coleman, London (2023), 126 Eldridge Street, New York (2023).
