Mary Ceruti has honed her eye at some of the most prestigious institutions in the United States. Prior to becoming Executive Director at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, she spent nearly two decades as Executive Director and Chief Curator of SculptureCenter in New York, where she organized exhibitions and special projects with artists including Nairy Baghramian, Sanford Biggers, and Monica Bonvicini. Soon, she will unveil the exhibition 'Walker Design Triennial: Beyond Materialism', bringing together some of the most compelling contemporary designers to explore how they are addressing societal challenges and opportunities through the unique lens of design.

From spectacular presentations to more intimate discoveries, Ceruti shares, in her own words, some of the works that stand out for her at Unlimited, Art Basel’s exhibition platform for projects that transcend the classical art fair stand.

‘There is much to like about this year’s iteration. Unlimited is not defined as a thematically curated project, but in 2026, helmed for the first time by Ruba Katrib, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at MoMA PS1, there are some threads to pull. It feels grounded yet energized, of the moment, while spanning decades.

The tone is set by Chris Burden’s L.A.P.D. Uniforms (1993), a lineup of oversized police uniforms complete with weapons (which I’m told are replicas based on the Swiss government’s very reasonable prohibition of importing guns into Switzerland). The work was made in response to the LA riots of 1992 and reminds us of historical cycles of racially motivated violence, particularly of the state-sponsored kind. Once inside, eyes move quickly to Oskar Schlemmer’s wall sculpture Homo, Composition in Metal (1930-1931): Abstracted metal lines in space draw a human figure or perhaps an automaton, reflecting on the human body amidst a period of anxiety and technical innovation. Sound familiar?

Alfredo Jaar’s early projection piece The Power of Words (1984) laments the way in which words fail us in the face of human suffering, while also examining the shifting structure of the mass media. Made at a moment when images were starting to become our primary source of storytelling and information, Jaar projects a series of press images onto a photograph of a manual typewriter (the traditional tool of the journalists’ trade), backlit by a red neon light. They show individuals in a state of trauma taken in sites of conflict around the world. It has all the elements of Jaar’s best work: insisting we witness the harms we can do to each other while also acknowledging the structures that can engender and perpetuate those very harms.

Torkwase Dyson is showing a recent architecturally scaled sculpture: Way Over There Inside Me (A Festival of Inches). It was originally commissioned in 2022 for a major touring exhibition organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Mississippi Museum of Art called ‘A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration’, which asked twelve Black artists to reflect on the 20th-century movement of six million Black Americans from the South to cities in the North East, Midwest, and West. With interlocking forms, the spatial composition engenders movement around and through it. It makes us aware of our own bodies within that space and reminds us that all spaces are designed for some bodies.

Niki de Saint Phalle’s colorful, phallic monument Blue Obelisk with Flowers (1992) is based on a condom design. In the midst of the AIDS crisis, the artist designed colorful condoms to encourage people to see these life-saving prophylactics as something fun. De Saint Phalle later turned the designs into equally joyful sculptures.

Lastly, Goshka Macuga’s Exhibition M: A Re-enactment (2023-2026) enlivens institutional critique through absurdist theater. Through an installation of tapestry and soft sculptures printed with archival imagery, Macuga puts herself in transhistorical dialogue and dance with the French novelist, politician, and theorist André Malraux and the art historian Alfred Barr about the history and future of museums and the role of artists to help reimagine them.’