In this 25th edition of Regionale, thirteen artists from the tri-border region around Basel explore the intersections where intimate moments meet public gestures at Kunsthalle Basel. From quiet corners to bustling squares, mental landscapes to architectural boundaries, these artworks trace fleeting glimpses of inner worlds—A private smile emerging into the public sphere. These pieces unfold in the silent spaces where the private and collective converge, offering fresh perspectives on the contours of our everyday lives.

The ascent through the stairwell becomes a choreography of penetration: David Moserʼs precise green laser beam cuts through familiar architecture, creating new lines in space. In relation to the spatial conditions and surrounding artworks, the work reframes the staircase and teases the scale of its surroundings. This intervention questions our understanding of presence and physicality, fragmenting boundaries and shifting perspectives.

In this play between visible and invisible, we encounter Margherita Rasoʼs aluminum sculpture, balanced on a saxophone stand like a materialized breath. The artist embraces the fractures and vulnerabilities of the creative process, letting them become apparent in the metallic skin of her works. This fragility finds its echo in a reclining figure resting on a shelf pedestal in the first exhibition room—a quiet dialogue between presence and absence.

Mia Sanchezʼs sculptures High rise, 2021, reminiscent of living room lamps, fill the space with both form and gentle light. Upon closer inspection, the domestic forms reveal themselves as miniatures of metropolitan facades. In these model-like recreations of photographed buildings, the artist explores the anonymity of urban life. The works blur the line between visibility and concealment, raising the question of what human stories unfold behind countless windows.

In this intermediate space between public architecture and private existence, Roberto Ronzaniʼs drawings of the Leyla serie, 2023, unfold like visual diaries. Moving from daydream to text and then to drawing, he constructs fragile yet evocative architectures of memory. Rendered in pencil, colored pencil, and pastel chalk, these works capture moments of loss and reflection, layering fleeting emotions into meditative compositions. These inner topographies find their continuation in Péixe Collardotʼs autofictional paintings.

Created over long periods of introspection, they open windows between present and imagined future and turn his studio into a space of self-projection. Each brushstroke becomes a trace of self-encounterance, revealing the complexity of identity and dreams.

In the immediate space, Yongkuk Koʼs wooden boxes materialize as mediators between recollection and imaginative power. They preserve fragments of lived experience in self-contained visual worlds, serving as vessels for documentation that transcends time while remaining forever changeable.

Leon Mörmannʼs humorous explorations of village microcosms reveal the poetry of the everyday. A visual language of the peripheral emerges: one that understands the private not as an antithesis to the public, but as its impish commentator. The painterly process itself— the collaging and overlaying, the patient or impatient waiting for the right moment—reflects the complex temporality of these relatable village narratives.

Ute Maria Schmid uses paper as both a painterly and sculptural medium, folding, cutting, and layering it to create textured compositions. Her works shift between matte and gloss, transforming the seemingly mundane into symbolic landscapes. In multiple series, she explores the voids and densities of our surroundings, hinting at hidden narratives in the everyday. The wall color, inspired by her interieurʼs tones, invites to immerse in the spatial world she creates.

In this atmosphere of transition, we encounter Noon Selina Marrero Julian who reimagines mundane objects to explore intimacy and consumption. Metallic hooks, removed from their commercial context, become central figures in an unexpected love story, surrounded by raw charcoal drawings on fiberboard that embrace imperfection. A recurring helicopter motif, inspired by a fleeting observation, becomes a humorous yet critical element, oscillating between childhood dreams of weightlessness and the adult cycles of consumption.

Manuela Morales Délanosʼ miniaturized Alps operate as intimate signifiers in the exhibition. The artificial snow becomes both disguise and revelation—like the private smile we wear in social situations, it speaks of simultaneous connection and distance. Yet in its very artificiality, the snow tells us a different truth: that what we perceive—be it Swiss neutrality, national borders, or our collective aspirations for success—often masks more complex realities.

While the first room opens a vast field of imagination and imagined worlds, the second exhibition space focuses on the body and its physical presence. David Moserʼs sculptures engage with separation and connection through four glass cabins distributed in corners. The glass serves not as a window but as a barrier, examining the dynamics of privacy, visibility, and recognition. Mattresses suggest a fragile form of protection, while empty corners recall the enigmatic atmo- sphere of a secluded niche or a darkroom.

Against the harsh glare of the exhibition lights, Ester Alemayehu Hatleʼs No stop human, 2024, documents the bodyʼs presence through direct contact with paper. Tracing movements and points of touch, her drawings capture sequences of time and physicality. Dark, over- lapping lines evoke exhaustion and tension, creating a dialogue between material and body. Surrounded by Moserʼs glass cells, her work blurs the line between performance and docu- mentation, inviting viewers to reflect on their own interactions with space.

Like a soundtrack, driving music flows through the exhibition, emerging from the rhythm of the architecture. The momentum builds in the final room with Daniel Kurthʼs Schere klasse kapital (2024, Scissors Class Capital), a video work critiquing a consumption-driven society. Through an urgent rhythm, the camera gazes at urban architectures, overlaid with a poem assembled from existing texts that addresses inequality, consumption, and labor. A driving musical score mirrors the cityʼs pulse, amplifying the workʼs critique.

Against the backdrop of an examination of our consumption-driven society, Nolan Lucidiʼs Sculpture for a sex worker, 2024, emerges as an almost accurate reconstruction of spaces drawn from personal experiences. These memory-reconstructed rooms reflect themes of projection, identity, and desire, highlighting the deliberate choreography of intimacy. The act of selecting a perfume to stage fantasies becomes a poignant reflection on how personal memory and societal narratives shape experiences of the body and labor.

In the overall concept of the exhibition, artistic positions condense into a multilayered exploration of moments where the private shines through and merges with the collective to create a new perception of the everyday. The artist's map fleeting moments of physical presence, transform personal dreamscapes into formal condensations, and question the constructed spaces of national and personal identity, as well as the overlap of mental and physical spaces. Some works become sites of humorous interventions, while others speak of the burden of history.

A private smile refrains from definitively defining these spaces—instead, the exhibition reveals those interstices where freedom and limitation condition each other.