The Basel Art Museum has transformed into a haunted space where spirits roam freely through its galleries. An eerie exhibition titled "Ghosts: On the Trail of the Supernatural" brings together 160 works and objects from the past 250 years, exploring how artists have depicted the supernatural across different eras. The show demonstrates that art is teeming with ghosts, and museums are filled with them - images like unredeemed souls from bygone times that now return in this comprehensive exhibition.
Visitors entering the museum are immediately confronted by the supernatural. Eerie flickering wall lamps guide the way through the underground passage between the old and new buildings, where a white ghost blocks the path. Standing larger than life and seemingly petrified, the specter hovers over a pool of blood on the floor. German artist Katharina Fritsch summoned this spirit, reminding viewers that ghosts often relate to unpunished acts of violence. These apparitions emerge from the past to demand justice, returning repeatedly until old scores are settled and open wounds are healed.
Museums themselves serve as repositories for these artistic spirits - images that flash back to past times like memories. Museums cannot rid themselves of these ghostly presences; they can either make them visible by displaying them or banish them from view by storing them in basement vaults. However, sooner or later, they resurface. The Basel exhibition now showcases John Everett Millais' 1895 painting from London's Tate collection, bearing the enigmatic title "Speak! Speak!"
Millais' haunting work depicts a young man startled awake in the middle of the night. At the foot of his canopy bed, a white female apparition pulls apart the curtains. Love letters lie scattered on the nightstand, suggesting the man may have dreamed of a lost beloved after reading their correspondence. This piece exemplifies how art history overflows with such spectral imagery.
While ghosts may not be a primary motif in painting and sculpture, they testify to visual art's role as a vast repository of images - a place where sediments of dreams, visions, memories, and longings return like unredeemed souls in pictures. The exhibition illuminates this theme historically by presenting William Blake's and Johann Heinrich Füssli's depictions of spirits from Shakespeare's dramas. The British have long been obsessed with ghosts, and Swiss artist Füssli, who lived in London for a time, was infected by this fascination.
The show features Blake's 1806 drawing where Hamlet's father's ghost appears, alongside early photography specimens. During photography's early days, questions arose about whether ghostly phenomena could be captured by camera, potentially providing evidence for spirits' existence. The exhibition demonstrates the unbroken fascination with ghosts through contemporary art examples, even though modern audiences no longer truly believe in their reality.
These spirits return persistently in various forms throughout the museum. Beyond Fritsch's polyester ghost emanation, visitors encounter Ryan Gander's small marble sculpture titled "Tell my mother not to worry." The British conceptual artist portrayed his daughter Olive pretending to be a ghost by covering herself with a bedsheet. This simple white cloth transformation into phantom form is deeply embedded in collective visual memory, with art history contributing significantly to this imagery.
How does one depict the invisible and unreal? The famous biblical ghost appears in Benjamin West's painting, where the American-British artist portrayed the spirit in a white cloak. The work shows King Saul throwing himself at the feet of a luminous white figure after commanding the Witch of Endor to summon the prophet Samuel's spirit. The white cloak perhaps relates to burial shroud colors, with white serving as the non-color that can make everything disappear.
The modern white cube exhibition space quickly becomes an uncanny place when nothing visible is displayed and art appears merely as invisible presence. Gander's 2019 conceptual work "Looking for something that has already found you (The Invisible Push)" consists of a single empty exhibition room - something rarely seen in museums. This installation features wind machines hidden in walls, creating sudden air currents on visitors' skin that feel genuinely unsettling.
Spirits have always surrounded us, as American poet Emily Dickinson captured in verse: "One need not be a chamber to be haunted, one need not be a house; the brain has corridors that surpass material place." We create our own ghosts through imagination. The human mind is a difficult-to-control poltergeist that can easily frighten us when left alone. We must fear our brain's dark corridors more than the darkest haunted house.
Rachel Whiteread's ghost house, over which Dickinson's lines are whispered through speakers, isn't dark but painted entirely white. With her 2020 work titled "Poltergeist" and the shed's damaged condition, the British artist suggests an uncontrollable supernatural force has ravaged the space. Urs Fischer's "Chair for a Ghost" from 2003, displayed in the same room, shows ghosts' unbroken power. The chair is broken or decomposed as if by corrosive liquid - perhaps ectoplasm, the substance allegedly comprising spirits.
Such forces may have been responsible for Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung's table knife breaking into four pieces. Jung attended séances for years and connected this incident in his dining room to supernatural phenomena. He carefully preserved the knife fragments displayed in Basel, annotating them with notes about the incident. This event initiated his research into the human psyche's unexplainable aspects and inspired his 1902 dissertation "On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena."
For Jung, ghosts weren't spook figures but symbols of unconscious psychological conflicts and traumatic collective experiences. He understood the human psyche's shadowed zones and how darkness returns to haunt us as manifestations of the repressed until we become conscious of it. Such self-examination processes are painful and therefore unpopular, making ghosts and spirits increasingly popular in everyday culture, entertainment, film, literature, and art.
The exhibition also showcases ghosts' humorous side through Angela Deane's overpainted 2025 photograph "All of us," demonstrating that spirits represent humor and mischief alongside their more serious manifestations. The comprehensive show runs until March 8, 2026, offering visitors an unprecedented journey through supernatural art across centuries, revealing how artists have consistently returned to ghostly themes as expressions of human consciousness and cultural memory.
