Pilar Corrias is pleased to return to Art Basel Paris+ with a collaborative booth by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Vivien Zhang that interrogates historical systems of classification and the politics of taxonomical thought.

Rirkrit Tiravanija has developed a site-specific wallpaper installation that reproduces the tree of life from the naturalist Ernst Haeckel’s General Morphology of Organisms (1866). Across this wallpaper Tiravanija has incorporated a new series of stencils featuring the names of 40 invasive plant species. Vivien Zhang will present new paintings based on ocean-orientated map projections, alongside works that scrutinise discrepancies in the naming of botanical specimens, where, in Chinese, certain flowers are named as ‘pseudo’ or ‘fake’.

Highlighting some of the imperfect technologies humans have invented to understand the world, the artists’ shared presentation emphasises the omissions such knowledge relies upon.