What do ghosts smell like? Should we fear them? Do they talk \u2013 or are they limited to wails and the occasional shriek? These questions and more are pondered in Ghosts: Visualising the Supernatural at Kunstmuseum Basel, a spooky and consistently curious exhibition that unpicks our obsession with spirits loitering in limbo and shows how artists, pseudoscientists, conmen and enthusiasts have imagined them over the past two-and-a-half centuries.<\/p>\n
Ghosts have morphed from being creepy cameos in fireside tales to the star act. The exhibition opens with a montage of clips from cinematic chillers \u2013 from the slime-spewing wraiths of Ghostbusters to the unsettled phantoms of the Spanish civil war in The Devil\u2019s Backbone. European auteurs have a particular fondness for apparitions and manifestations. Recently, 2023\u2019s All of Us Strangers blended a ghost story with a London-set gay love story. Ghosts have become malleable narrative tools.<\/p>\n
But, as the this Swiss exhibition illustrates, they\u2019ve always had fluid identities. \u201cThere are many varying ghost traditions in the world, and we specifically chose to focus on the western hemisphere in the past 250 years,\u201d says Eva Reifert, Kunstmuseum\u2019s curator of 19th century and modern art, who has orchestrated this deep dive into the spirit world. \u201cYou could do ghost exhibitions in other parts of the world and get very different ghosts haunting the halls.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the 19th century, the focus was firmly on documentary evidence. Victorians were crazy about ghosts, but they also wanted proof. Psychic studies soon began to collide with traditional science, emerging theories in psychology and new technologies such as photography and sound recording. In the following century, however, artistic interpretations of ghosts came to the fore.<\/p>\n
A ghost-hunting kit invented by the English librarian Eric Dingwall. Photograph: Senate House Library, University of London<\/p>\n
Although often depicted as troubling presences \u2013 the famous 1936 photograph of the \u201cBrown Lady\u201d on the staircase at Raynham Hall in Norfolk still brings a chill \u2013 ghosts can also comfort. A large group of \u201cspirit photographs\u201d from the 1920s \u2013 formal portraits in which ghosts of loved ones appear alongside the sitter \u2013 illustrate our desire to reconnect with the dead. These fraudulent photographs \u2013 frequently debunked by Harry Houdini, who saw these spirit illusionists as professional competition \u2013 offered consolation to the bereaved for a fee.<\/p>\n
Reifert has gathered together more than 160 works spanning a variety of media. Ghosts are captured in paintings, prints, snapshots, film, sculpture, textiles, light works and conceptual installations. There are literary ghosts, including illustrations of Hamlet\u2019s father and Marley\u2019s ghost from Charles Dickens\u2019s A Christmas Carol, and works by modern masters, including Paul Klee, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp. There are also bizarre objects, such as a ghost-hunting kit owned by the English paranormal sleuth Eric Dingwall (complete with luminous pins with which to seize your prey). And there is a kitchen knife, once owned by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, that supposedly shattered into pieces thanks to a poltergeist.<\/p>\n
Reifert has enlivened the galleries with some large-scale installations and interventions. \u201cWe wanted real fog, but our conservators said no,\u201d she notes. In the opening space, audiences morph with spooks as they are confronted with a \u201cpepper\u2019s ghost\u201d \u2013 a theatrical technique involving figures reflected on a sheet of plateglass, a device created by the Victorian scientist John Henry Pepper.<\/p>\n
Further on, Emily Dickinson\u2019s poem One Need Not Be a Chamber \u2013 to Be Haunted can be heard softly whispered through hidden speakers and, further still, whole rooms are filled by deconstructed ghost houses created by Rachel Whiteread and Cornelia Parker. And the final gallery, quite literally, delivers a shiver.<\/p>\n
Rachel Whiteread, Poltergeist, 2020. Photograph: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen\/Robert Bayer, Basel<\/p>\n
In researching the exhibition, Reifert has drawn on the knowledge of two experts: Andreas Fischer, a German specialist in spirit photography at the marvellously X Files-sounding Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg; and the British scholar Susan Owens, author of The Ghost: A Cultural History.<\/p>\n
Walking through the galleries, Owens tells me that her favourite ghost story is an account of an otherworldly event recorded in John Aubrey\u2019s late 17th-century volume Miscellanies. \u201cAnno 1670, not far from Cirencester, was an apparition,\u201d writes Aubrey. \u201cBeing demanded whether [it was] a good spirit, or a bad? returned no answer, but disappeared with a curious perfume and most melodious twang.\u201d<\/p>\n
Owens loves the yarn because it is \u201cboth mysterious and a bit absurd, like many of the best ghost stories\u201d. Indeed, a surrealist thread runs through the show \u2013 a Ren\u00e9 Magritte painting from 1928 pictures a comical spirit shaped like a paper cutout; Angela Deane paints whimsical ghosts on to found photographs \u2013 and continues into the museum\u2019s gift shop, where visitors can buy specially commissioned ghost scents by Heretic Parfum. \u201cThe set features fascinating notes of black water lotus, oak moss, the hint of a candle just extinguished, a forest at night, and a room bearing the trace of its past life,\u201d notes British scent specialist, Tasha Marks.<\/p>\n
While invisible in a mirror, ghosts reflect their times. Victorian and Edwardian spectres have sexual undertones. In John Everett Millais\u2019s 1895 painting Speak! Speak!, a young man is disturbed in bed by an apparition of a beautiful woman. He looks as if he\u2019s never seen a woman before, let alone a ghost. And then there are the photographs of ectoplasm, supposedly emerging, white and gloopy, from the orifices of female mediums. Freud would have loved those.<\/p>\n
Ren\u00e9 Magritte, The Comical Spirit, 1928. Photograph: undefined\/Collection Ulla et Heiner Pietzsch Berlin\/ProLitteris, Zurich\/Jochen Littkemann, Berlin<\/p>\n
More serious concerns emerge in Ghost Story, a 2007 video piece by Willie Doherty which eerily addresses victims of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. And a dread of child mortality lingers throughout the show. The small, sad, sculptural figures of juvenile ghosts by contemporary artists Tony Oursler and Ryan Gander are profoundly unnerving, simultaneously cute and tragic.<\/p>\n
Contemporary interest in the spirit world is part of a complex cocktail of anxieties: everyday life in the 21st century feels precarious, the security of religious faith has faded, the climate crisis means that the weather can\u2019t be forecast with the same accuracy as before, and technology has redefined intelligence. Ghosts allow us to consider our shifting foundations, both social and existential. Curating the exhibition was disorienting, acknowledges Reifert. \u201cMy worldview has had a sort of update to be more accepting of the irrational.\u201d<\/p>\n
Basel Kunstmuseum has produced a spectral blockbuster exhibition that conjures up a host of questions \u2013 intellectual, spiritual, philosophical, artistic \u2013 while retaining huge popular appeal. It would travel well but, of course, ghosts seldom move on.<\/p>\n
Ghosts: Visualising the Supernatural is at Kunstmuseum Basel, Swizerland, 20 September 2025-8 March 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What do ghosts smell like? Should we fear them? Do they talk \u2013 or are they limited to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":168001,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-168000","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168000"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168000\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}