Liste Art Fair Basel

Sara MacKillop’s work operates within the overlooked margins of contemporary material culture, those spaces where utility, repetition, and administrative function converge. Her practice engages mass-produced objects not as neutral carriers of content but as active sites of enquiry. Informed by a logic of conceptual recursion, her approach treats the residue of daily life; office supplies, educational tools, and packaging—as structures that both conceal and reveal the systems that produce them.

For Liste, MacKillop presents an integrated body of work: a series of mini highlighter works and a carpet piece. Together, they form a quiet but incisive meditation on reproduction, authorship, and the poetics of standardisation. The wall-based works consist of shrink-wrapped canvases, each bearing its original commercial branding intact yet interrupted by a precise incision, into which a coloured miniature highlighter has been inserted. These works resist easy categorisation: they are at once image, object, and index. By embedding conditions of reproducibility directly into the structure of the work, MacKillop collapses the distance between a ‘version of’ and the original.

The shrink wrap itself, taut, glossy, and reflective, calls attention to the surface as a site of both aesthetic and ideological projection. Walter Benjamin wrote of the experience of looking into shop windows, where the viewer sees not just the merchandise but their own reflection layered over it. Here, a similar dynamic unfolds: the viewer’s image appears faintly on the plastic sheen, as though projected onto the artwork itself. The works become screens, surfaces that absorb and return the gaze, implicating the viewer in the logics of display and consumption they interrogate.

In parallel, a roll of utilitarian carpet unfurls across the floor in an understated but spatially insistent gesture. This act of inversion reconfigures the grammar of exhibition space, redirecting attention toward the architectural and institutional protocols that shape the reception of art. Here, even the floor covering becomes a critical surface, coded, contingent, and estranged from its function.

For this presentation, all materials have been sourced locally in Basel, drawing attention to the conditions of production often disavowed in the circulation of culture. By situating her work within the infrastructures it critiques, MacKillop refuses the distance between object and system.