Kunsthalle Basel has announced Rock Bottom, a new exhibition by Ozgur Kar that opens on October 30, 2026, and runs through January 24, 2027. It is the artist's first institutional solo exhibition in Switzerland, and it turns the Kunsthalle's rooms into the setting for a single theatrical production assembled from video, sculpture, animation and sound.

Kar, born in 1992, treats video as a sculptural material rather than a cinematic one, building installations in which moving images, objects and sound occupy space together. His works circle experiences of solitude, longing and uncertainty, and he draws on theatre, animation and drawing to compress opposing feelings into a stripped-down visual language that moves between the grotesque and the tender. For Rock Bottom he has created a new production spanning several rooms, staged as one continuous environment rather than a sequence of separate pieces.

The exhibition was commissioned together with Spike Island in Bristol and the Galeria Municipal do Porto, with support from the Mondriaan Fund, and it continues Kunsthalle Basel's recent run of first institutional presentations for younger international artists. It also gives Swiss audiences their first full-scale encounter with a practice that has been shown mainly in project spaces and group exhibitions so far.

For visitors, the appeal lies in Kar's unusual handling of the moving image: screens and sculptures share the floor, sound bleeds between rooms, and the artist's figures seem caught between performance and stillness. The show arrives at a moment when Basel's autumn programme is unusually rich in firsts, and it offers a quieter, more introspective counterpoint to the city's larger autumn exhibitions.