Shuang Li has spent much of the past decade probing the strange intimacies of digital life: the way screens mediate desire and belonging, and how algorithmic systems seep into and reflect the everyday experience. Her installations, videos, interactive websites and performances blur autobiography with collective fantasy, weaving together things like emo fandom and role play to explore the ways in which identity fragments and circulates online. Her exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel marks the artist’s first institutional solo show in Europe. In a presentation both atmospheric and ominous, Li narrows her focus to a niche corner of social media: storm-chasing videos.
“There’s a particular quality in Shuang Li’s work that I find hard to look away from,” says Mohamed Almusibli, the director and chief curator of Kunsthalle Basel. “She doesn’t illustrate ideas about technology and media; she makes us, the viewers, feel their texture. The weight, the noise, the way attention gets pulled in ten directions at once.”
Shaped by internet culture
Born in 1990 in China and now based in both Berlin and Geneva, Li trained in media studies at New York University before emerging as a distinct voice among a generation of artists shaped equally by internet culture and global mobility. Alliance is centred on a major new film installation examining the obsessive and dangerous pursuit of tornadoes, hurricanes and extreme meteorological events across vast territories. “What stays with me is how much of this work was discovered rather than planned,” Almusibli says, explaining that Li first encountered storm-chasing by watching live-streamed videos on TikTok of strangers driving into tornadoes.
Shuang Li: “asking questions about the systems we move through every day” Courtesy of the artist
Li explains that she was, “instantly hit by the romanticism… ultimately chasing nothing but wind”. She began watching the videos obsessively. “I started to see a parallel between the physical landscape where tornadoes form and the media landscape itself,” she says. “Tornadoes usually emerge over extremely flat land, just like the flattened media landscape we are situated in today. After that, I couldn’t stop seeing the resemblance everywhere—little vortices constantly forming, each one trying to pull you in.”
Indeed, for Li, storms and the dangerous practice of chasing them became metaphors for contemporary existence within global networks shaped simultaneously by climate instability, surveillance technologies and capitalist extraction.
The conceptual triad of ecology, data infrastructure and human desire is central to the exhibition. In unpacking these themes, Li resists straightforward critique in favour of something more psychologically slippery. Screens, platforms and digital systems appear not only as mechanisms of control but as spaces onto which people project fantasies of connection and intimacy.
“The work doesn’t ask you to observe from a safe distance,” Almusibli says. “It pulls you into it, manipulates your sense of speed and space until the tornado feels less like something approaching from the horizon and more like something already forming from within. That, for me, is the emotional core of the exhibition. Not catastrophe as subject matter, but catastrophe as the only honest description of how we already live.”
The work doesn’t ask you to observe from a safe distance—it pulls you into itMohamed Almusibli, curator
Avoiding falling into either dystopian cliché or hypercriticism, Li’s work remains unexpectedly tender. Her installations recognise that even within corrupt or chaotic systems, people continue searching for forms of communion.
“I hope our visitors leave slightly disoriented in a productive way; not confused, but recalibrated,” Almusibli says. “Shuang is asking questions about the systems we move through every day without noticing: digital media, information flows, the infrastructures of attention. She is pointing towards the sense of being permanently mid-storm. That resonates deeply right now. More than anything, I hope the show creates a space for reflection that prompts people to question what it means to navigate the world we live in today.”
• Shuang Li: Alliance, Kunsthalle Basel, until 12 September
