Blas Zach, Braga Sofia, Egedy Stefanie, Fan Sian, Fernández-Pello Teresa, Fries Anan, Gawęda Dorota, Harvey Auriea, Hottarek Maya, Ichihara Etsuko, Kulbokaitė Eglė, Peschek Christiane, Skawennati, Meier Wiratunga Robin, New Rituals [for the End of the World] at House of Electronic Arts, Basel

What remains of rituals when the future loses its promise? If the world appears as a structure creaking under the weight of its own contradictions, what gestures do we continue to repeat in order to convince ourselves that there will still be a tomorrow?

The apocalypse, after all, is not merely a catastrophe. It is a form of waiting. A way of looking at the present. News cycles flow without interruption, images of violence accumulate, and technology simultaneously promises salvation while threatening dissolution. In this landscape, rituals no longer seem to belong to the past; instead, they emerge as tools for emotional, symbolic, and even political survival.

It is from this uneasy threshold that New Rituals [for the End of the World] takes shape, a group exhibition curated by Anan Fries and Marlene Wenger at the House of Electronic Arts in Basel. Rather than depicting the end of the world as a spectacular event, the exhibition turns its attention to what happens in the meantime. How does one live within a collapse perceived as ongoing? What mythologies emerge when reality seems to have exhausted its certainties?

The exhibition design constructs a navigable landscape rather than a simple sequence of artworks. Brightly lit areas alternate with spaces immersed in semi-darkness, creating a progression that feels like drifting between places of worship, technological laboratories, and post-industrial environments. Visitors are compelled to slow down, continually negotiating their position among screens, suspended installations, sculptures, and audiovisual environments.

There are no obvious hierarchies. The works converse as fragments of a single distributed narrative. Digital images coexist with objects that evoke relics, talismans, speculative architectures, and ritual devices. The impression is that of moving through an ecosystem in which spirituality and technology have ceased to function as opposing forces and have instead become elements of the same language.

The exhibition draws its strength precisely from this tension. On one side emerges the universe of platforms, algorithms, and identities shaped through technological mediation; on the other, archaic symbols, magical practices, forms of devotion, and desires for transcendence come into view. The artists offer no reconciliation. Rather, they reveal how deeply these dimensions are already intertwined within contemporary life.

From a technical and material perspective, the exhibition stands out for its remarkable diversity of approaches. Video installations, immersive environments, sculptural elements, suspended structures, and electronic devices coexist without any single medium dominating the others. Technology is not treated merely as a representational tool; it becomes narrative material. Screens, projections, and interfaces assume an almost liturgical presence, while the physical components of the installations restore weight, fragility, and corporeality to subjects often confined to digital abstraction.

Particularly compelling is the way many of the works oscillate between relic and prototype. Some elements evoke artifacts from a distant past, while others seem to arrive from a future that remains difficult to comprehend. This temporal ambiguity amplifies the exhibition’s conceptual core: the sensation of living through a transitional phase in which old systems of meaning are eroding and new codes are still searching for form.

The diversity of the participating artists, Blas Zach, Braga S()fia, Stefanie Egedy, Sian Fan, Teresa Fernández-Pello, Anan Fries, Dorota Gawęda, Auriea Harvey, Maya Hottarek, Etsuko Ichihara, Eglė Kulbokaitė, Christiane Peschek, Skawennati, and Robin Meier Wiratunga, contributes to a polyphonic reflection. The works do not converge toward a single answer. Instead, they multiply possibilities. Some imagine new forms of belonging, others propose practices of emotional resilience, while still others interrogate the increasingly blurred boundary between faith, simulation, and technology.

The exhibition resists the temptation of didactic critique. Although it originates from a curatorial framework that invokes wildfires, live-streamed genocides, authoritarian drift, and the growing power of major technology corporations, the project does not merely document disaster. Rather, it seeks to understand what forms of cohesion might emerge from its ruins. This is a crucial distinction: instead of contemplating collapse, the exhibition observes the behaviors that collapse itself generates.