By Joshua Mack

Located in the Basel container port on the Rhine, somewhere near East Bumblefucksville, Volta is everything Art Basel isn't: calm, comfortable, fresh and fun. Sixty-seven galleries are sparely installed over two floors of a warehouse suffused with natural light filtering through perspex panels in the roof. Practically no one was there when I was, and price points don't attract the Hollywood stars and Russian oligarchs that have made the main fair such a gossip-fest.



That means, of course, that the exhibitor pool is mainly comprised of smaller, less commercially established galleries like Riflemaker and Rokeby from London and Derek Eller and Newman Popiashvili from New York, all of which are run by serious dealers with strong points of view, plus galleries like main fair exile Michael Janssen from Cologne and dealers like Nara Roesler from Sao Paulo, Enrique Guererro from Mexico, and Michael Stevenson from Cape Town who don't have the political clout to get past the selection committee that controls entry to the big game.


Julieta Aranda, There has been a miscalculation (flattened ammunition), 2007

Unlike its New York iteration, this Volta doesn't isn't beholden to the single-artist booth concept. One exception though was Julieta Aranda and Michael Janssen, showing a large plexiglass container that seems to be hosting some kind of internal process, and for that reason it's reminiscent of Hans Haacke's condensation cube or Damien Hirst's vitrine for the rotting cow head covered in flies (A Thousand Years, 1990). Aranda's cube is filled with sanded down pages of science fiction books, shredded into a dust that gets blown around inside the cube in short, random bursts from an air pump.

Michael Stevenson is showing an outstanding 2006 triptych of a folk healer's shop by the superlative photographer David Goldblatt, which epitomizes his poignant meditation on the racial legacies of his native South Africa.



David Goldblatt, Ugqirha Wisintu Dr Paul, Hofmeyr, Eastern Cape. 4 August 2006, one part of a tryptich and a detail

Nara Roesler was showing photographs by Cao Guimarães, which turned images of the platforms and tents in which homeless people live into explorations of public and private space, dignity and empathy.


Cao Guimarães, Untitled, from the series 'Open Doors', 2008
There were short videos by Hugo Boss-prize nominee Patty Chang at Berlin gallery Arratia, Beer, and work by the Guatamalan performance artist Regina José Galindo, winner of the Golden Lion at the 2005 Venice Biennale.


Regina José Galindo, Who Can Erase the Traces?, 2003
There's also obvious stuff like huge Dusseldorf school-style photographs and collages based on retro magazine illustration. Then there's Tavares Strachan's photos of public ice coolers, which mimic the vibe of Stephen Shore and William Eggleston. And a fair dose of shit like plastic bags arranged like a hard-on inflated by a rotating electric fan. But that's par for the course, and when dealers have the enthusiasm to discuss work in great detail with anyone who comes into the booth, you're at a fair that's still concerned with art as well as commerce.

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