SAHA supports Kunsthalle Basel in presenting Özgür Kar’s first institutional solo exhibition in Switzerland, Rock Bottom, and publishing an accompanying artist monograph. The exhibition is on view between 30 October 2026 - 24 January 2027.

In his multidisciplinary practice, Özgür Kar crosses traditional genre boundaries by combining video, sculpture, animation, and sound into spatial installations. His works circle existential experiences of solitude, longing, and uncertainty. For Kar, video is not a cinematic but a sculptural medium. By bringing together diverse cultural forms such as theatre, animation, and drawing, he condenses opposing emotions into a stripped-down visual language that hovers between the grotesque and tenderness.

Özgür Kar’s first institutional solo exhibition in Switzerland, Rock Bottom, presents a new theatrical production unfolding across multiple spaces at Kunsthalle Basel. Bringing together video, drawing, sculpture, and sound, the exhibition features figures based on Kar’s hand-drawn sketches, which take the form of video sculptures where the screens both give them form and impose limitations upon their movements. Appearing independently throughout the exhibition spaces, these human, animal, and anatomical figures endlessly repeat the same movements and sounds. Despite their monumental presence, the characters reveal their inherent powerlessness and vulnerability, persevering within an inescapable cycle. Taking its title from a state of hopelessness and exhaustion, Rock Bottom also considers this lowest possible point as a threshold from which change might become possible. The exhibition remains at this juncture, offering no hints as to what may follow.

The exhibition has been commissioned in collaboration with Spike Island, Bristol, and Galeria Municipal do Porto / Ágora E.M.

Özgür Kar (1992, Ankara) is an artist living and working in Amsterdam. He creates sculptural video installations and sound-driven exhibitions that operate between moving image, theatre, and spatial staging. Kar’s practice unfolds at the intersection of sound, sculpture, animation, and installation. Drawing on folklore, experimental theatre, early animation, shadow-play traditions, and television culture, Kar develops non-linear theatrical scenes in which desire, mortality, boredom, and longing recur as conditions that are at once intimate, absurd, and otherworldly.

About Kunsthalle Basel

Kunsthalle Basel is one of Europe’s leading institutions for contemporary art, dedicated to fostering innovative artistic approaches and providing a platform for emerging artists. Established by the Basler Kunstverein, founded in 1839, Kunsthalle Basel opened its doors in 1872 and has since supported experimental and pioneering artistic practices. With artists at the heart of its exhibitions and programmes, the institution brings new perspectives in contemporary art to the forefront, offering a space for critical reflection, dialogue, and engagement with artistic production.