Vanessa Beecroft has spent more than three decades deploying groups of women in rigid, static tableaux vivants, with a sequential body of work, the VB series, initiated in 1993, exhibited across museums, galleries, and unconventional sites worldwide. Her latest film pushes that practice somewhere different: into myth, and into the orbit of one of the most photographed women on earth.
Untitled (Izanami) (2025), Beecroft's reimagining of the Ancient Greek myth of Persephone's abduction by Hades, stars Bianca Censori and is currently on view at Art Basel as part of Galleria Lia Rumma's presentation at Unlimited. The Italian artist has presented a work running 32 minutes and 32 seconds, with Censori as its protagonist.
Shot in a semi-abandoned hotel near Tokyo, the film draws on the Persephone myth, with Censori's central role involving crawling through a hotel corridor in minimal clothing. She appears in various states of undress: unwinding bandages from her face, staring into the camera with tears pouring down her mascara-strewn face. The title also invokes Izanami, the female deity of Japanese mythology associated with creation and death, a layering of mythological registers that feels deliberate in Beecroft's hands.
At the fair, the film is presented within a dressed set: a hospital bed, chair, and surgical lamp alongside five plaster sculptures of disembodied female torsos and leg fragments, creating a surgical atmosphere. The installation logic extends the work beyond screen into physical space, something Unlimited, Art Basel's section for large-scale works that exceed the constraints of standard booth presentation, is specifically designed to accommodate.
Galleria Lia Rumma opened in Naples in 1971 and has long played a key role in movements including Arte Povera, Minimal Art, and Conceptual Art, exhibiting artists from Joseph Kosuth to Marina Abramović. Beecroft has been part of the gallery's program for decades; an early VB26 performance took place at its Naples space in 1997.
Beecroft was one of the first artists to collaborate with fashion brands, beginning in the 1990s, and has worked extensively with Ye since 2009. Collaborations have included the 2016 Yeezy Season 3 launch at Madison Square Garden and two opera performances, Nebuchadnezzar and Mary, both in 2019. The Basel visit was, by any measure, a conspicuous reunion.
The work appears to meditate on the commodification of the female body under conditions of intensifying media scrutiny, a theme exacerbated by Censori's own position as its lead actress. Even her presence at Art Basel, accompanied by her husband, whose recent antisemitic and racist comments have been widely condemned, made headlines.
Ye and Censori also revived the 2016 Mannequin Challenge at Art Basel, freezing in place as a camera moved around them. The video was shared by Censori on TikTok, showing the couple and several partygoers performing the challenge at a birthday celebration for her stylist, Gadir Rajab, during the fair. In the context of a film installation about stillness and the scrutinized female body, the moment felt either entirely apt or entirely at odds with the work beside it, possibly both.
The critical paradox that has followed Beecroft for years remains: her use of the female body is intended to interrogate its commodification, yet the very act of exposure risks reinforcing what it claims to question. Casting Censori, a figure whose public image is almost entirely constructed through her body and through media reaction to it, makes that paradox harder to ignore.
Art Basel's 2026 Basel show opened with preview events on June 16 and 17, before public days ran from June 18 through June 21. Whether Untitled (Izanami) travels from here into institutional collection or further international exhibition remains to be seen. What it already confirms is that Beecroft's inquiry into bodies, gazes, and female mythology has lost none of its friction, and found, in Censori, a subject who arrives pre-loaded with everything that inquiry wants to interrogate.
Check topics and authors from this story to see more stories like this in your personalized feed and receive updates when new work is published.
