Whispers of Japan

In Basel, Swiss artist Luciano Castelli’s exhibition Whispers of Japan unfolds as a suspended performance rather than a conventional gallery display. At Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger, painting, sculpture, photography, and film are brought together through an atmosphere that seems choreographed in slow motion. The Japanese influence that has run through his work since the early 1980s now returns in concentrated form, coloured by his first actual trip to Japan in 2024.

Butoh, the so-called “dance of darkness”, forms the emotional core of the show. Large-scale photographs explore bodies caught between tension and collapse, echoing Butoh’s focus on vulnerability, transformation, and the proximity of death. His lifelong experiments with self-staging and role-play resurface here, yet the human ...