Few institutional posts prepare exhibition makers for the role of curator of Unlimited, Art Basel’s unique platform for large-scale projects. Each year, it showcases mammoth installations, expansive sculptures, massive wall paintings, extensive photo series, and video works of Brobdingnagian size and ambition. In 2026, Ruba Katrib, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at MoMA PS1, takes up the reins, bringing a fresh curatorial vision to the platform.

Syrian American curator Katrib is renowned for her bold, thought-provoking exhibitions and commitment to amplifying emerging voices. At MoMA PS1, she has staged solo exhibitions by artists including Edgar Heap of Birds (2019), Niki de Saint Phalle (2021), and Rirkrit Tiravanija (2023), and curated ‘Greater New York’ (2021), the sprawling quinquennial survey of artists living and working in New York City.

Starting with an empty 16,000 m² space, Katrib’s oversize brief for Unlimited entails, among other tasks, selecting projects from hundreds of gallery proposals to construct a coherent curatorial narrative nearly from scratch. Unlimited was characterized as ‘a monumental puzzle with complex logistics’ by her predecessor Giovanni Carmine, the director of the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, and Katrib has stepped up to the challenge with a mix of moxie and erudition.

In conversations with Christian Viveros-Fauné, she explains how both contemporary and historical artworks can ‘respond to their moment’ and why we need to reinvent the idea of monumentality. 

Christian Viveros-Fauné: Congratulations on the new gig, Ruba. To make your new role clear to readers, let me try to frame a few of your responsibilities, at least as I understand them. The idea, I believe, is you select a large number of artworks, as many as 70, from a slew of proposed gallery projects. These may initially have very little to do with one another, so it’s up to you to make the connections, or, as it were, invent a through-line. Am I describing the crux of the job correctly?

Ruba Katrib: More or less. As you know, many galleries apply with proposals to Unlimited. To do this, they fulfill a lot of requirements. They will have exhibited at the fair previously, they are vetted by the selection committee – there’s a long list of etceteras. Once I go through these proposals, I undertake to learn about the works that speak to me. I consider those my highlights. I talk to the galleries about individual projects, making the process more akin to a conversation. I learn what the galleries are doing, what the artists are doing – if they have major gallery or museum shows coming up, for instance. There are many factors, as you can imagine.

How many proposals did you look at for this year’s exhibition and how many individual projects are you featuring?

The numbers vary from year to year. For Unlimited 2026, I looked at over 100 proposals and selected 69 projects. The quality of applications is especially high this year, particularly when one considers the ongoing political and economic instability around the world. Despite this, the galleries that applied did so with the best possible artworks. Unlimited includes both brand-new contemporary works and art historical heavyweights. 

David Hammons’s In the Hood (1993) – which is not in the show – also comes to mind. Hammons’s famous sculpture is simply the hood of a sweatshirt hung high on the wall – its meaning was transformed after the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012.

And there’s also Niki de Saint Phalle’s totem in our exhibition – it’s called Blue Obelisk with Flowers (1992). I worked with her totems previously at MoMA PS1. They appear to be merely colorful, bright, cheery sculptures. But what most people don’t realize is that they were made in response to the HIV/AIDS crisis. De Saint Phalle made many such totems. They were her attempt to promote safe sex and make condoms fun. She was one of the first artists to embrace that initiative, but, of course, she used a very different aesthetic register than Burden. That is fascinating to me. Both artists produced monumental artworks to engage major crises but did so in utterly different ways.

Did you quickly identify a theme or themes in your selections?

RK: Part of what I wanted to do was to find artists who responded to, or are responding to, their moment – artists both contemporary and historical. I wanted to identify work that is historical but also, in its own way, prophetic. These are artworks that connect to their time, but also with our own; artworks that illuminate current strategies, as well as speaking to adaptive aesthetic or formal concerns. Eventually, I realized I was developing groupings rather than strict themes – ways of relating personally to artworks by specific artists and having their works relate to each other.

Can you say more about the process of arriving at these ‘groupings’? The press release for Unlimited says that this year’s edition ‘foregrounds artists whose practices engage with the political, social, ecological, and spatial conditions of the present.’ 

There’s always an echo of the present in the past, and this is evident in the exhibition. Take Chris Burden’s L.A.P.D. Uniform (1993). Burden made a series of giant Los Angeles Police Department uniforms just a year after the LA riots. They included oversized regulation belts, holsters, batons, handcuffs, Beretta 92F handguns, badges, the works. The sculptures were first made and exhibited at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop. That XXXL gear contained echoes of the future when it was first fabricated. That’s what’s astounding about great art – it changes context and meaning over time. It’s brilliant to be able to illustrate that evolution.

These would be instances of arriving at different types of monumentality?

That’s how I see it. I’ve worked a lot with sculpture: commissioning artists, working with floor plans, exhibition design, deploying spatial situations – this has been a big part of my curatorial practice. What I want to do with Unlimited is both collapse and expand the idea of monumentality. Large work needs a lot of space, but some small things need a lot of space, too. The Ryan Gander animatronic mouse that is in the exhibition – it’s titled I’ve felt everything I’m going to feel – The Unspeakable World (2026) – is quite small, yet it requires a lot of room. It would never work properly in an art fair booth. Unlimited is about thinking through that spatial challenge many times and in unique ways. One has to reinvent possibilities for deploying great artworks in monumental ways, even if they are not actually physically huge.

I believe the earliest work you are exhibiting is Oskar Schlemmer’s Homo, Composition in Metal (1930–1931), a wall-mounted wire work. Unlimited also features brand-new commissioned works? Were you cognizant of wanting to span a century of art?

This was something I very much wanted – to have key art historical artworks together with fresh new takes. These kinds of connections, in turn, create a unique kind of flow and what I think of as expanded narrative space. The proximity of certain works to each other makes for unexpected surprises and seemingly impossible dialogues. Unlimited makes them possible, even if it’s for just a few days.