Valentin Noujaïm | Fabio Cherstich

Fabio Cherstich was invited for one of his well-manufactured lecture performances at the Kunsthalle Basel. I am curious as to how he will intervene in the context of Valentin Noujaïm’s exhibition Pantheon. It’s a kind of must-go event for a quiet Sunday. I know that Cherstich’s voice theatrically displays and reflects on images, a dispositive that cannot help but play with Noujaïm’s film installations.

And there he is, precise and humorous in voice, a spotlight on his empathetic face while telling the stories of three New York artists of the gay scene of the Eighties – a scene that, until the Nineties, produced an exceptional intensity of creativity, one that has been eradicated by the HIV/AIDS pandemics. Cherstich actually tells his own story of searching for three almost forgotten protagonists of a revolved Pantheon, of a season that blossomed and shone with the ephemeral glory of a world destined to disappear. His work is dedicated to the past, but yearns to be anchored in the present and turned to the future. The dedication of the archivist and the passion of the art lover are fuelled by something that I can formulate through the motto reality matters.

It seems tricky to find a connection between this motto and Noujaïm’s science-fiction stories, be they documentary such as Azedine Benabdelmoumene’s witness in Pacific Club (2022) or imaginative, as in the other two films that complete his trilogy La Défense, To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion (2023), and Demons to Diamonds (2025). Reality and fiction are blurred in Noujaïm’s poetics, playing with the futurist features of the disquieting architecture of La Défense, in Paris, in order to reveal the social controlling and oppression in preventive security policies. Modernity is saturated with suspense, which appears to inevitably prelude catastrophe. Collapse is the keyword that waits for his hyper-functionalist environments; could collapse also be the connection to Cherstich’s stories of joy and oppression in the American gay scene of the Eighties?

I try to overcome the documenting intentions that solidly build Cherstich’s lecture and look closer at the work of the three artists, because paying homage to them is not only a question of memory. Their art inspires in me three more keywords, words that I would like to place in Noujaïm’s Basel exhibition together with “collapse”. For Ellis Darrel, the photographer, the keyword is distortion, revealing his creative commitment to an identity discourse involving both homosexuality and blackness. Distortion echoes dystopia, a marking character of Noujaïm’s filmic trilogy. For Larry Stanton, the portraitist, the keyword is desire, expressed as calmly explosive in his drawings. To this end, Noujaïm’s characters answer with a sort of inverted desire that is nothing save depression, isolation. For Patrick Angus, the painter, the keyword is the viewers, which he originally puts at the centre of his painted scenes. These paintings are not about voyeurism but participative watching, the act of watching being one desired thing with the exhibition of the bodies, and this particular keyword cannot but have me refer to Noujaïm’s discrete but fundamental gesture in installing his films in the rooms of the Kunsthalle: three different theatre architectures that play with the cinematic black box in the white cube, between actual immersion and medium reflection – almost a quote. Three architectures that question us as being more or less participative viewers.

In the last stepped theatre where Cherstich ended his lecture performance, with a call for further stories to be sought and told, the audience exploded in a truly compassionate applause. For Fabio, and for Patrick, Larry, and Ellis. One of those applauses that makes you dream of a real community, the one that Noujaïm’s stories claim have disappeared, just to reappear in the theatre that he offered to Cherstich at the Kunsthalle in Basel.