How Dealers’ Concerns About Accessibility Pushed Basel’s Liste Art Fair to Relocate

A video artwork by French artist Florian Fouche at Parliament gallery’s booth at the Liste Art Fair shows the artist’s father, who is hemiplegic, navigating the streets of Paris in a wheelchair.

It is unlikely that Fouche’s father—or, for that matter, any wheelchair users at Liste’s VIP preview today—could have navigated the art fair’s previous venue, a maze-like former brewery. The fair’s decision to stay in the convention center where Art Basel is held for several more years, as opposed to returning to its longtime home, hinged in part on dealers’ concerns about accessibility.

“No part of that building was accessible,” a Liste exhibitor who preferred not to be named told ARTnews at today’s VIP preview of the former venue.

From its founding in 1996 up until 2019, Liste occupied the Werkraum Warteck, a former brewery a ten-minute walk from the convention center. After canceling the 2020 edition due to the pandemic, the fair moved to the convention center in 2021 in solidarity with Art Basel and did its 2022 edition there as well.

While some of the former brewery’s rooms were spacious, the building as a whole was often compared to a rabbit’s warren, with Escher-like staircases, some of them extremely narrow, that led to galleries showing in low-ceilinged nooks and crannies. Those small spaces—and many others throughout the building—were inaccessible to those who use wheelchairs.

Dealers spoke of disabled collectors who weren’t able to visit them there. At the convention center, which houses the more accessible Art Basel fair, there are elevators, and Liste takes place in a highly navigable large open space.

Last year, Joanna Kamm, Liste director since 2018, canvassed the dealers who’d taken part in the 2022 edition as to whether the fair should return to the Warteck. “A huge majority wanted to stay” in the convention center, she said. The main reason for this was that the convention center space is more democratic. Unlike at the Warteck, where some galleries got huge spaces and others shoeboxes, at the convention center all the booths are a uniform size. But another motivation for gallerists was accessibility. For the next few years, Liste will stay there.

“It was interesting to hear all these thoughts from the galleries,” Kamm said. “I thought, ‘It’s a new generation.’”

In the US, the Americans with Disability Act (ADA) mandates that buildings constructed after 1990 comply with accessibility standards. But in Europe and in many older American buildings, accessibility issues are rampant.

The city of New York, for example, is currently suing Steven Holl Architects over a recently-completed library in Queens that has bathrooms that can’t be used by people in wheelchairs, as well as other parts of the building that are inaccessible to disabled people, per legal documents. The city claims that it will cost $10 million to bring the library into compliance with the ADA.

In Switzerland, rather than requiring businesses, employers, and institutions to make their buildings accessible, disabled people are paid a stipend or institutionalized. But as a result, this means disabled people are often excluded from many aspects of public life.

Liste’s current edition aspires toward a different experience. Dealers showing there seemed happy with the results. “Everyone can come and get around here,” said Liste exhibitor Haynes Riley, whose gallery, Good Weather, is based in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Chicago, during the VIP preview. “[Accessibility] is one positive that has outweighed other things.”