ART BASEL STATEMENTS
A solo presentation by Hana El-Sagini
Booth M18 | 16-21 June 2026
Press release EN
For Art Basel Statements 2026, Gypsum is pleased to present a solo booth by Egyptian multidisciplinary artist Hana El-Sagini. For this presentation, titled Plot Twist, she creates a sculptural installation composed of braided bronze sculptures and wall reliefs that creep, branch, and erupt across the booth’s surfaces. Emerging from the artist’s own experience of illness, the work reflects on our capacity for rupture, renewal, and growth.
At the heart of the booth, a radiating installation unfolds through an expanding network of braids. Twisted, organic forms spread across the walls and rise from the floor, hovering between bodily and vegetal registers. They may evoke hair, roots, branches, veins, or the nervous system. Their movement is uneven–something between living and dying: dense and dormant in some places, more active and proliferating in others, as strands converge, diverge, and generate new paths.
Rather than affirming bronze’s traditional associations with monumentality, El-Sagini subdues the material’s authority. Muted grey patinas lend the works a restrained, almost bodily presence, suggesting age, fatigue, wisdom, and survival. In doing so, she shifts bronze away from triumph and toward a quieter register of endurance. The work proposes a sculptural environment in which the loss is not final, and where life is continually capable of regenerating itself.
Taha Belal’s practice draws on the visual language of everyday bureaucracy, shaped by his experience working in his family’s business, amid papers, laminates, advertising materials, and fluorescent-lit office interiors. Repurposing these familiar materials, he subjects them to painstaking processes of cutting and redacting that expose their constructed nature while revealing a latent expressiveness.
For Basel Social Club, Belal’s work consists of carbon transfers onto receipts, magazine pages, and recycled paper. The transferred images are based on cropped gestures and closeups of hands sourced from newspapers, advertisements, and circulating media imagery: men in suits shaking hands, pointing at microphones, clapping. Isolated through the transfer process, these gestures become fragmented signs of presentation, persuasion, and the choreography of power, thereby reflecting how images, authority, and communication circulate between business, media, and everyday life.
Z FOR ZARAFA
A solo show by Lara Baladi
2 June - 23 September 2026
Press release EN
Gypsum is pleased to present Z for Zarafa, the first solo exhibition by Egyptian-Lebanese artist Lara Baladi at the gallery. Emerging from Anatomy of Revolution, her monumental web-based ABC of global protests (2019–ongoing,) the exhibition unfolds through a new body of work spanning tapestry, photography, and sculptural installation. For Baladi, the letter Z (“Zain” in Arabic) becomes an entry point into intertwined histories of migration, diplomatic exchange, and revolutions.
In Baladi’s sprawling alphabet, the letter Z stands for many words, including “Zarafa,” the giraffe gifted by Mohamed Ali to King Charles X of France in 1827. More than a diplomatic offering, Zarafa became a spectacle: a living emissary who traversed continents, empires, and imaginations. She sparked a cultural frenzy—hairstyles rose in imitation of her height, textiles echoed the markings of her coat, and her image proliferated across objects and decorative surfaces. For Baladi, however, Zarafa’s afterlife persists as both a diplomatic relic and a metaphor for displacement and forced migration.