The Last Diamond

Anicka Yi creates tactile and fragrant sculptures, paintings, and installations that play on the paradox between the enduring, the impermanence and timelessness of art. “I'm interested in connections between materials and materialism, states of perishability and their relationship to meaning and value, consumerist digestion and cultural metabolism,” she says.

These two tumble dryer doors act as diffusers. They invite the viewer to open their portholes to discover the scent of burning paper in the first washing machine and the perfume made to forget, named Aliens and Alzheimer’s in the second. This perfume was conceived by Barnabé Fillion.
In collaboration with the Foundation, Anicka Yi has conceived a book in a limited edition which is entitled 7,070,430K of Digital Spit, a Memoir imbued with this scent of amnesia.
The Last Diamond underscores the limits of sensory knowledge, the olfactory in particular. As the other “alchemical concoctions" that Yi produces, the artwork blurs the landmarks between the natural and the artificial, questionning the relationship between the intellectual and the corporeal.

Produced by Lafayette Anticipations and the Kunsthalle Basel