At Kunsthalle Basel, Pantheon reimagines a business district as a stage on which power is constructed, contested, and memorialized. Weaving together film, objects, and spatial installations, Valentin Noujaïm (b. 1991) creates in his inaugural institutional solo exhibition an experience that unearths untold stories hidden in the shadows of urban landscapes.

With the premiere of the final part, the filmmaker concludes his trilogy, La défense, which can be seen here in its entirety for the first time. In a France that drowns out the histories of its marginalized minorities, Noujaïm uses the sensual to make their stories visible, employing a cinematic strategy that thus consciously becomes a political gesture. His protagonists move through nocturnal streets, conference room debris, and underground clubs, accompanied by atmospheric soundscapes and pulsating rhythms. Either alone or in conversation, they reflect on the dehumanization and alienation of a surveillance-ridden society, their experiences spanning the 1980s to the present.

In each of the exhibition spaces, the cinematic is trans- formed into installation—each film presented in a specific scenography. Visitors, walking through corridors of a seemingly abandoned building, encounter ghostly remnants of conference rooms and instruments of surveillance. Watched over by historical gargoyles, La défense, both the setting of the trilogy and Europe’s largest business district, looms as both the subject and a metaphor of institutional power.

Noujaïm’s Pantheon stands as a counter-monument to the state’s pantheon by honoring the overlooked stories and suppressed voices that are equally part of French society. His exhibition thus becomes a critical resonance chamber that endures society’s fractures to create alternative images.

Valentin Noujaïm: Pantheon Traditionally a temple for all gods and later France’s national hall of fame, the Panthéon in Paris stands as a monument to the country’s celebrated figures. In this exhibition, Valentin Noujaïm creates an alternative pantheon that exposes the architecture of power through untold stories of French society.

His film trilogy La défense, named after Europe’s largest business district, was built in the 1960s as a symbol of modern France atop a former shantytown for Algerian workers. Each of the films occupies a distinct immersive environment, mapping the tensions between integration and exclusion, visibility and erasure, ascent and fall.

Archive of resistance

The exhibition begins in an abandoned conference space, where Pacific club (2022) immerses visitors through the memories of Azedine Benabdelmoumene. The film reconstructs a fleeting sanctuary amid the upheavals of the 1980s. The Pacific club, one of the first nightclubs in Paris to welcome young people from the banlieues, most of whom were children of immigrants, provided them with a sense of belonging in a city that often marginalized them. Yet, against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic, the heroin crisis, and the rise of the Front National, this fragile refuge was overshadowed by systemic neglect. While the club struggled to survive, the French government erected the Grande Arche in the same district for the bicentenary of the French Revolution, a grand monument to republican ideals. The film exposes the gulf between these symbolic gestures and the lived realities of those left on the periphery, questioning who truly finds a place within the national narrative.

Between protection and control

As visitors step into the next space, two sculpted gargoyles, trapped within steel enclosures, act as silent sentinels that watch and are watched in return. Noujaïm draws on medieval symbolism, where gargoyles once guarded sacred spaces from evil spirits. Here, however, they are fallen sentinels, reimagined as the relics of a surveillance state that sees everything and yet protects nothing. Their grotesque, hybrid forms, half monster and half patron saint, reflect the contradictions of modern security systems, where protection and oppression, visibility and control, merge into an unsettling unity.

Beyond the gargoyles lies a sterile corporate office, devoid of warmth. It is within this environment that To exist under permanent suspicion (2024) unfolds. The film follows Claire, a young executive navigating the glass towers of corporate life, as she undergoes a systematic dehumanization. Under constant surveillance, she finds herself trapped in a cycle of alienation. The tension builds toward an inevitable transformation, from a compliant office worker to a vengeful arsonist. Within a system of permanent surveillance and discrimination, Claire’s metamorphosis into a so-called “monster” paradoxically becomes an act of self-assertion, a refusal to disappear.

Les héros du néant (Heroes of nothingness)

Leaving the corporate landscape behind, visitors enter a counter-monument to the people erased from official history. Suspended above them, silk-printed film stills on steel plates create a secular pantheon, elevating individuals who exist outside the traditional narrative of heroism. It is an act of reclamation, an assertion that these lives deserve to be remembered. Noujaïm borrows the term héros du néant from the French author Louisa Yousfi, positioning his protagonists as figures of quiet resistance. Much like the youths who gather beneath the Grande Arche in search of belonging, they are symbols of survival in a society that offers them zero recognition.

The ascent continues toward the exhibition’s final space. In Demons to diamonds (2025), the final chapter of the trilogy, a voice from the underground echoes through the district, repeatedly warning of impending catastrophe. Recurring suicides cast long shadows, silent yet persistent reminders of a structure that has already failed. The glass towers of La défense appear fractured into isolated realities, each window revealing a separate, enclosed world. The workers inside the towers share a paralyzing awareness of systemic dysfunction yet remain incapable of breaking free. The verticality of the business district becomes the catalyst of an endless fall, a system spiraling toward its own undoing. Despite the search for recognition, the business district remains a scene of collapse.

Noujaïm’s trilogy La défense exposes a district once envisioned as a beacon of French modernity as a monument to exclusion. From the underground refuge of the Pacific club to the sterile corporate offices and the deadly heights of the towers, he charts a topography of power, a space where the marginalized must navigate between integration and rejection, ascent and fall, humanity and monstrosity.