by Jeni Fulton // Dec. 2, 2025
This article is part of our feature topic Ghosts.
Ghosts drift through our screens, books and memes, from Netflix’s Addams Family reboot ‘Wednesday’ to ‘Nosferatu’ via ‘Caspar.’ While dominant in popular culture, museums have mostly relegated ghosts and their depictions to commercial tourist efforts, like the Berlin Dungeon. The Kunstmuseum Basel’s exhibition ‘Ghosts. Visualizing the Supernatural,’ curated by Eva Reifert, creates a counter-narrative, by examining ghosts through the lens of art, psychology, photography and culture, in a show with more than 160 works that span 250 years. It asks a deceptively simple question: what do ghosts actually look like, and what does it mean when we try to picture them?
The show traces how Western visual culture has tried to capture something, or someone, that by definition shouldn’t be visible at all. It starts from a supposed paradox: why the 19th century, the so-called age of rationality and technology, was also the great age of ghosts. While science and industry reshaped everyday life, spiritualism, séances and occult experiments flourished. Ghosts became tools for probing the emerging idea of the psyche-early rehearsals for psychology and psychoanalysis.
Katharina Fritsch: ‘Geist und Blutlache,’ 1988, Basel, Kunstmuseum, Neubau, installation view ‘Geister. Dem Übernatürlichen auf der Spur,’ lackiertes Polyester, Plexiglas und Lack, 200 x 61 x 61 cm (Geist); 3 x 209.4 x 53.2 cm (Blutlache) // © 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich, Philadelphia Museum of Art: Promised Gift of Keith L. and Katherine Sachs, photo by Max Ehrengruber
The exhibition opens, fittingly, with Katharina Fritsch’s towering ‘Ghost with Pool of Blood’ physically blocking the visitor’s path, and nearby, Philippe Parreno’s ‘Flickering Lights’ sync their nervous glow to Stravinsky’s ‘Petrushka,’ transforming the corridor into a threshold space. Before we even enter the main galleries, we’re reminded that ghosts often appear where violence, unfinished business or latent fear linger.
From there, the exhibition dives into the 19th century, when literature, theater and painting provided a visual vocabulary for hauntings. Biblical and literary ghosts appear in works like Benjamin West’s ‘Saul and the Witch of Endor’ (1777), where the prophet Samuel is conjured as a monumental figure wrapped in luminous white, and in the many interpretations of Shakespearean specters. Henry Fuseli, William Blake and Eugène Delacroix all wrestle with the ghost of Hamlet’s father: is this an external, armored apparition or a projection of Hamlet’s tormented mind? Blake’s ‘Hamlet and His Father’s Ghost’ and ‘Brutus and Caesar’s Ghost’ emphasize the supernatural glow and commanding gestures of the spirits, while Delacroix’s lithograph keeps their status ambiguous, hovering between hallucination and supernatural visitation.
Benjamin West: ‘Saul and the Witch of Endor,’ 1777, Öl auf Leinwand, 50.5 x 65.1 cm // Copyright Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. Bequest of Clara Hinton Gould
At the same time, popular literature was turning ghosts into vehicles of social critique. Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol,’ presented in an early illustrated edition, uses the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come to condemn the brutal inequalities of industrial capitalism. The moral ghost story becomes an instrument for imagining different futures, not just revisiting the dead.
When photography emerged around 1830, some saw it as a quasi-scientific tool capable of capturing what the eye could not see. In the United States, William H. Mumler pioneered “spirit portraits,” inserting pale, secondary figures—recognizable as loved ones—into conventional studio photographs. His famous image of Mary Todd Lincoln with the spectral figure of her assassinated husband leaning protectively over her shoulders reads today as both touching and manipulative: a visual manifestation of grief, desire and the will to believe.
London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company: ‘The Haunted Lane,’ ca. 1875, albumen print on cardboard, 8.4 x 17.7 cm // © Denis Pellerin
In Europe, Munich physician and parapsychologist Albert von Schrenck-Notzing staged elaborate séances with mediums such as Eva C. and Stanislawa P., photographing so-called ectoplasmic “materializations” emerging from their mouths and bodies. The resulting gelatin silver prints oscillate between eerie and absurd: veils, scraps of fabric and newspaper clippings masquerade as spirit matter, hovering awkwardly between scientific evidence and theatrical hoax.
This fascination with chance, projection and altered states surfaces elsewhere in the show: in Justinus Kerner’s inkblot ‘Klecksographs,’ which conjure demons and faces from folded smears; in ‘Die Seherin von Prevorst,’ his famous study of a Swabian medium; and in Gabriel von Max’s painting of the same seer, caught in trance before a cosmic drawing. Already, ghosts are less about chains and bedsheets than about access to invisible psychic realms.
Ryan Gander: ‘Tell my mother not to worry (ii),’ 2012, marble, 80 x 175 x 60 cm // Private Collection; Anish Kapoor, London, photo by Julian Salinas
The exhibition’s central gallery turns this explicitly inward. A shattered knife from C. G. Jung’s household, which broke inexplicably during a period of intense séance-attending, marks the psychiatrist’s entry into the study of occult phenomena and, eventually, the unconscious. On the walls, Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted –’ whispers the unsettling idea that the most terrifying ghosts are internal: “Far safer… External Ghost / Than it’s interior confronting.” Haunting becomes a metaphor for unresolved conflict, trauma or desire.
From here, the show unfolds into the 20th and 21st centuries, where artists test what a ghost can be once it is freed from narrative and religious frameworks. Some works keep the classic white-sheet silhouette but twist its meaning: Ryan Gander’s marble sculpture of his daughter Olive pretending to be a ghost freezes a fleeting childhood game into stone, while Angela Deane paints cartoon-like sheets over anonymous figures in found photographs. Her interventions transform cheerful holiday images into scenes of absence and estrangement, haunted by the unreliability of memory.
Heidi Bucher: ‘Kleines Glasportal, Bellevue Sanatorium, Psychiatrische Anstalt Kreuzlingen,’ 1988, textil und Latex, 340 x 455 x 1 cm // Courtesy the Estate of Heidi Bucher and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London, photo by Julian Salinas
Elsewhere, ghosts stand in for histories that refuse to be buried. Heidi Bucher’s latex skin of a psychiatric clinic doorway literally peels a threshold from an institution of control and judgment, turning architecture into a vulnerable membrane. Glenn Ligon’s text work, ‘Untitled (I’m Turning Into a Specter Before Your Very Eyes and I’m Going To Haunt You),’ grinds a sentence about haunting into dense black illegibility, suggesting how racism, homophobia and the AIDS crisis render lives spectral—present and absent at once.
In another room, Corinne May Botz’s photographic series ‘Haunted Houses’ documents interiors where residents claim to live alongside ghosts. Her careful, almost forensic compositions refuse special effects: if a haunting is present, it’s in the stories, the atmosphere, the sense that something has happened here that leaves a residue. Nearby, Cornelia Parker’s ‘PsychoBarn (Cut-Up)’ dissects the most iconic haunted house of cinema—the set from Hitchcock’s Psycho—into fragments, exposing how thoroughly pop culture has staged and codified our fears.
Cornelia Parker: ‘PsychoBarn (Cut Up),’ 2023, mixed media // Courtesy of the artist & Frith Street Gallery, London, photo by Julian Salinas
The final rooms push ghostliness into the realm of pure experience and media. Mike Kelley’s ectoplasm self-portraits parody historical spirit photographs while likening artistic inspiration to a messy, bodily excretion. Tony Oursler’s ‘Fantasmino’ projects melancholic digital eyes into a small ghost-shaped sculpture, suggesting that each new technology spawns its own phantoms. Rachel Whiteread’s smashed, whitened shed ‘Poltergeist’ and Urs Fischer’s half-dissolved chair for a ghost hint at violent, unseen forces. And in the closing space, Ryan Gander’s invisible installation of hidden fans that gently push visitors as they move through an apparently empty gallery insists on making them the target of an uncanny “presence.”
Rachel Whiteread: ‘Poltergeist,’ 2020, Wellblech, Buche, Kiefer, Eiche, Haushaltsfarbe und Mischtechnik, 305 x 280 x 380 cm // Courtesy of Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, photo by Julian Salinas
What emerges from ‘Ghosts. Visualizing the Supernatural’ is not a simple catalogue of spooks, but a complex portrait of how societies process what they cannot fully master—death, grief, injustice and the unruly unconscious. Ghosts here are metaphors, mirrors and troublemakers. They point to what has been repressed or denied, to histories of colonialism, violence and economic crisis that still shape the present. Yet they also carry humor, play and a strange tenderness. In the end, the exhibition suggests that ghosts are less about the dead than about the living: about what we remember, what we cannot let go of and what continues to insist on being seen.
Exhibition Info
Kunstmuseum Basel
Group Show: ‘Ghosts: Visualizing the Supernatural’
Exhibition: Sept. 20, 2025–Mar. 8, 2026
kunstmuseumbasel.ch
St. Alban-Graben 16, 4051 Basel, Switzerland, click here for map
