In the saturated rhythm of the global art fair circuit, it takes more than strong work to stand out—it takes curatorial vision. This June, Dubai-based RARARES Gallery makes a striking first appearance at VOLTA Basel 2025, presenting “Sensory Tapestry – A Cabinet of Folded Memories”, a group exhibition that redefines what it means to curate in the contemporary age.

Occupying Booth B4, the RARARES presentation is far from a conventional fair booth. Conceived as a living archive of cultural layering in the modern world, the exhibition transforms the fair experience into something closer to an embodied encounter—part Wunderkammer, part poetic resistance to spectacle. Visitors enter not simply to look but to feel, decode, and remember.

Curated by Marina Baisel, founder and artistic director of RARARES, this project brings together six international artists whose practices orbit around texture and materials as storytelling tools, expressive identity formation process, and aesthetic originality. To celebrate artists’ debut in Switzerland, each work is newly commissioned for Basel art fair and developed in close collaboration with the gallery, forming a strong curatorial story via integrated, sensorially charged environment.

This is not a static presentation, we’re modelling a space of folded identities—where material becomes metaphor, and form becomes a vessel for dialogue. It’s about inviting the viewer into that dialogue, not just as observer but as participant.

– Baisel explains.

A Cabinet of Cross-Sensory Artistry

The exhibition’s title hints at its ambition: to weave a tapestry of sensorial experiences, each thread rooted in cultural hybridity and material experimentation. Here, painting dissolves into glass, textiles bloom into sculpture, and ceramic forms hold memory like relics.

Young Emirati artists bring to this exhibition a powerful visual language drawn from heritage and regional memory via a vibrant and forward-looking contemporary lens. Their mixed-media works explore the emotional weight of tradition and the quiet resilience of personal history, often expressed through a search for new conceptual forms.

For example, Asma Alahmed (UAE) channels speculative cartographies, her works explore landscapes as psychic and historical terrains, pieced together through textiles, sculpture, and digital forms—resilient, shape-shifting, and resolutely forward-looking.

The work by Maria Koshenkova (Denmark/Russia), one of the foremost voices in contemporary glass sculpture, facilitates a seamless transition for the viewer—from the mixed-media expressions of Emirati artists to the solid yet fragile materiality of glass. Presented sculpture from her Faun’s Flesh series hovers between transparency and tension, embodying both the vulnerability and resilience of glass. With a deep sensitivity to breakage and endurance, Koshenkova’s work evokes the fragility of collective memory—and its persistent, enduring weight.

That is well balanced by a striking material shift on side walls of the stand to canvases with ceramics by Mathias Masarati (Norway). His work reflects a vivid and visceral approach to creativity, offering audiences a glimpse into a world where art is both a mirror and a prism, refracting reality into its many facets. New series of art works with ceramics by Masarati presented at VOLTA evoke themes of transformation, instinct, and vulnerability, challenging viewers to see the connections between their inner worlds and the natural order.

Alongside works by Maria Koshenkova and Mathias Masarati, the exhibition is enriched by presentations of works from young Emirati artists who are just entering the art world. Their work, in particular, explores the meaning of artistic respect for heritage within a contemporary context.

Following this rich palette of artistic experiences, the viewer is gently led to the soothing and peaceful fabric sculptures of Olivia Babel (France). She introduces a textile language to the ensemble through soft, abstract forms that trace her diasporic heritage. Her works are quiet meditations on place, migration, and the emotional dimensions of geography.

For this exhibition, a selection of UAE-inspired pieces by Olivia was made exclusively to offer a poetic conclusion—symbolically reflecting the diverse and vibrant contemporary art scene of Dubai, shaped by both international and local talents.

Form as Inquiry, Material as Memory

What threads these practices together is not a regional or stylistic affinity, but a philosophical one. Each artist, in their own right, treats material as language—capable of holding contradiction, nuance, and multiplicity. Their works don’t proclaim—they unfold. Slowly, sensuously, politically.
RARARES’ refusal to aim for aesthetic uniformity is part of its strength.
“This is not a geographical journey,” Baisel notes. “It’s a sensorial one—a choreography of textures and ideas that reflect the complexity of our cultural present.”