New Rituals [for the End of the World]

2026 Exhibition HEK House of Electronic Arts Basel

A wall-mounted openwork frame of translucent gothic ornament carrying small screens, circuit boards and red LED tickers in a dark room

Teresa Fernández-Pello, The Heart of the Hurt, 2023 · Photo: Franz Wamhof

The Earth is burning.

Mass atrocities are being broadcast live. AI is worshipped like a god. Fascists swing chainsaws. Sam Altman cheerfully admits that his technology will probably destroy the world — but that Big Tech will profit from it. We are living through apocalyptic times.

The artists in New Rituals [for the End of the World] explore oracles in algorithms, ancestral knowledge and synthetic intelligence, sound healing and AI eschatology. Together, they ask what symbolic acts can hold us when the sky is falling — and what new ritual practices emerge at the intersection of tech and spirituality.

Rust-brown sculptures and spiked spheres hang from thick white ropes, trailing white fibres onto a concrete floor — Maya Hottarek, Neokaryotes, 2023 · Photo: Franz Wamhof

Three white skeletal sculptures with long spines and amber-filled glass bulbs hang on chains before a grey wall — Christiane Peschek, FEVER, 2024–2025 · Photo: Franz Wamhof

A figure in a voluminous blue padded costume with a drone-camera helmet stands beside a wall screen showing a targeting display — Etsuko Ichihara, Namahage in Tokyo, 2017 · Photo: Franz Wamhof

A dark projection room with a large close-up of a face on screen, a vitrine in the foreground and a blurred visitor walking past — Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Spit and Image 1, 2025 · Photo: Franz Wamhof

Credits

Curators: Anan Fries, Marlene Wenger
Artists: Zach Blas, S()fia Braga, Stefanie Egedy, Sian Fan, Teresa Fernández-Pello, Anan Fries, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Auriea Harvey, Maya Hottarek, Etsuko Ichihara, Christiane Peschek, Skawennati, Robin Meier Wiratunga

Shown at

HEK House of Electronic Arts Basel, May–August 2026