Visualising the Supernatural at Kunstmuseum Basel charts how spooks and ghouls in artworks reflect shifting anxieties about everything from technology to sex.
What do ghosts smell like? Should we fear them? Do they talk - 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.
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 - from the slime-spewing wraiths of Ghostbusters to the unsettled phantoms of the Spanish civil war in The Devil's Backbone. European auteurs have a particular fondness for apparitions and manifestations. Recently, 2023's All of Us Strangers blended a ghost story with a London-set gay love story. Ghosts have become malleable narrative tools.
But, as this Swiss exhibition illustrates, they've always had fluid identities. "There are many varying ghost traditions in the world, and we specifically chose to focus on the western hemisphere in the past 250 years," says Eva Reifert, Kunstmuseum's curator of 19th century and modern art, who has orchestrated this deep dive into the spirit world. "You could do ghost exhibitions in other parts of the world and get very different ghosts haunting the halls."
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.
Although often depicted as troubling presences - the famous 1936 photograph of the "Brown Lady" on the staircase at Raynham Hall in Norfolk still brings a chill - ghosts can also comfort. A large group of "spirit photographs" from the 1920s - formal portraits in which ghosts of loved ones appear alongside the sitter - illustrate our desire to reconnect with the dead. These fraudulent photographs - frequently debunked by Harry Houdini, who saw these spirit illusionists as professional competition - offered consolation to the bereaved for a fee.
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's father and Marley's ghost from Charles Dickens's 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.
Reifert has enlivened the galleries with some large-scale installations and interventions. "We wanted real fog, but our conservators said no," she notes. In the opening space, audiences morph with spooks as they are confronted with a "pepper's ghost" - a theatrical technique involving figures reflected on a sheet of plateglass, a device created by the Victorian scientist John Henry Pepper.
Further on, Emily Dickinson's poem One Need Not Be a Chamber - 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.
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 British scholar Susan Owens, author of The Ghost: A Cultural History.
Walking through the galleries, Owens tells me that her favourite ghost story is an account of an otherworldly event recorded in John Aubrey's late 17th-century volume Miscellanies. "Anno 1670, not far from Cirencester, was an apparition," writes Aubrey. "Being demanded whether [it was] a good spirit, or a bad? returned no answer, but disappeared with a curious perfume and most melodious twang."
Owens loves the yarn because it is "both mysterious and a bit absurd, like many of the best ghost stories". Indeed, a surrealist thread runs through the show - a René Magritte painting from 1928 pictures a comical spirit shaped like a paper cutout; Angela Deane paints whimsical ghosts on to found photographs - and continues into the museum's gift shop, where visitors can buy specially commissioned ghost scents by Heretic Parfum. "The 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," notes British scent specialist Tasha Marks.
While invisible in a mirror, ghosts reflect their times. Victorian and Edwardian spectres have sexual undertones. In John Everett Millais's 1895 painting Speak! Speak!, a young man is disturbed in bed by an apparition of a beautiful woman. He looks as if he's 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.
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.
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't be forecast with the same accuracy as before; technology has redefined intelligence. Ghosts allow us to consider our shifting foundations—both social and existential. Curating the exhibition was disorienting acknowledges Reifert. "My worldview has had a sort of update to be more accepting of the irrational."
Basel Kunstmuseum has produced a spectral blockbuster exhibition that conjures up a host of questions—intellectual, spiritual, philosophical, artistic—while retaining huge popular appeal. It would travel well but, of course, ghosts seldom move on.