Print as Witness: Fakewhale at WUF Basel 2025: Celebrating Paper

Fakewhale is pleased to participate as official presenting partner of WUF Basel 2025: Celebrating Paper, an event entirely dedicated to publishing in the fields of contemporary art and photography. This special occasion will take place June 17–18, 2025, at the WUF Lounge & Studio, located on the 30th floor of Bar Rouge, Basel, right next to the main entrance of Art Basel.

More than an event, WUF Basel 2025: Celebrating Paper is a gesture of affirmation, a curated space to reconsider the place of publishing in a world increasingly dominated by digital flows. It is an opportunity to reflect on the materiality of publishing, on what it means to commit images and ideas to paper in an age where most of what we see is designed to disappear.

This is precisely why Fakewhale is there.

In recent conversations and curatorial initiatives, we’ve often returned to one central question: how do we document the ephemeral without flattening its intent? If the artwork today circulates primarily as image, what does it mean to reclaim the printed page, not just as support, but as statement, as gesture, as form of resistance?

We believe that paper is far from obsolete. Rather, it now holds a paradoxical position: both culturally marginal and conceptually urgent. In an art system dominated by frictionless dissemination and algorithmic visibility, the printed page becomes a terrain of resistance, slower, heavier, deliberate. It is no longer the default medium but a choice, and in that choice lies its potency. Print demands spatial presence, temporal duration, and embodied attention. It reactivates a mode of thinking that resists the feed, the scroll, the optimization of content. It introduces latency into systems designed for speed. In this sense, paper becomes not just a support, but a position.

In a context where documentation has increasingly become synonymous with simulation, where the image of the work often precedes or even supplants the work itself, print reclaims the right to complexity. It offers context over compression, sequence over simultaneity. A printed publication does not disappear after the dopamine spike of engagement; it lingers, it accumulates, it sits on a shelf, waiting to be reactivated. It does not depend on an algorithm to be retrieved. It does not ask to be liked. It asks to be read.

This is precisely why Fakewhale’s participation in WUF Basel 2025: Celebrating Paper is not simply symbolic, it is structurally coherent. WUF is not a nostalgic gathering of printed matter, nor a celebration of analog fetishism. It is a curatorial intervention in the ecology of publishing, a critical platform that brings together practitioners, editors, curators, and artists to reimagine what the printed object can mean today. Taking place in parallel to Art Basel, yet several floors above it, literally and metaphorically, WUF becomes a space of altitude and perspective, one that invites a different rhythm of looking, reading, and engaging with contemporary art.

As part of its contribution, Fakewhale presents a curated selection of publications that embody this stance, books that resist speed and favor duration, not as documentation but as propositions. Among them: Sources in the Air (2012) and A Retrospective by Appointment (2016) by David Maljković, whose work interrogates the role of archives, memory, and exhibition formats; I Need to Live (2024) by Juergen Teller, a disarming and intimate publication that blurs vulnerability and satire; Heimo Zobernig: Austrian Pavilion, Biennale Arte 2015, which reframes the architecture of the white cube through minimal interventions; Sculpture Painting by Heimo Zobernig, an object that performs its title and collapses the categories it references; a publication by Giovanni Termini, reflecting the artist’s sculptural investigations into temporality, matter, and spatial tension; FAGS by Jacopo Benassi, a photobook compiling intimate images produced over 25 years since his coming-out, exploring gender, body, and self-representation through obsession and directness; and Dimensies (2023) by Erris Huigens and Joe Gilmore, a collaborative artist’s book where Gilmore constructs a graphic context for Huigens’ photographic archive, combining painted interventions in abandoned spaces and reclaimed objects, while exploring form, painting, and drawing in site-specific dialogue.

At Fakewhale, we’ve long understood the image not as representation, but as battleground. A place where artistic intent collides with platform logic, where distribution strategies become aesthetic choices, and where the afterlife of a work is often shaped by the context in which it is seen rather than by the content it carries. To print is to interrupt that cycle. To print is to anchor.

To be at WUF means not just showcasing previously published material, it means extending our curatorial practice into the terrain of publishing as gesture. It means treating each page as a proposition, each publication as a sculptural act. And above all, it means recognizing that documentation is never neutral. It is a language, a framing device, a site of power. The document is not the remainder of an artwork, it is one of its possible futures.

In an age where everything looks like art, but nothing feels like it, perhaps paper can feel again. Perhaps the printed page is where attention, memory, and critical distance can be reactivated, not nostalgically, but radically.