Fair: Art Basel 2026, Basel

Liselor Perez (b. 1999) creates haunted domestic worlds where dolls and puppets blur the line between object and body. Her figures, both fragile and imposing, approach intimacy, care and vulnerability through the unstable territories of childhood, memory and domestic life, challenging inherited roles, identities and hierarchies. For Art Basel Statements, Sans titre presents an installation composed of a monumental five meter doll with a ghostly silicone face, a smaller figure with adult features, and a life size window framed with patterned textiles. Together, these elements stage a disquieting play of scales and proximities, where the child becomes architectural, the adult is miniaturized, and the viewer is drawn into a domestic theater with no clear exit.

At the center of the booth, the monumental doll appears as a figure both familiar and unsettling. Made from repurposed household linens, it has a childlike face cast in translucent silicone, whose bright orange hue evokes a ghostly skin, fragile and on the verge of disappearance. Its hands and princess dress are sewn from vintage fabrics and household textiles patterned in styles popular in children’s bedrooms in the 1990s, during the artist’s childhood. Through this materiality, the house seems to merge with the child, or perhaps the child, grown gigantic, transforms into a house: a habitable body, a porous boundary between inside and outside.

Seated against the wall, the doll reveals beneath its skirt a structure of rings tracing the outline of its legs and exposing a synthetic void. This opening, akin to a theater stage, lays bare the mechanics of its construction: a figure reduced to its artificial framework. Faced with this colossal being, visitors suddenly find themselves diminished to the scale of a doll. The roles are reversed, and it is now they who appear fragile and manipulable, caught in the silent gaze of the oversized child.

Beside it, a second, miniature doll is made of the same materials but bears the face of an adult. Hierarchies collapse: the child becomes a colossus while the adult shrinks, staging an ironic reversal of power relations. This play of scales, between large and small, fragile and monumental, runs throughout the presentation.

Facing the doll, an installation takes the form of a life size window framed by curtains made from fabrics similar in origin to those of the dress. Combining textile elements with a pencil drawing on paper, it reinforces the domestic resonance of the booth. Yet the opening it seems to promise proves deceptive: instead of a landscape, it reveals a drawn image of a closed curtain. The expected horizon turns into another image of an interior, enclosing the viewer in a visual loop with no escape.

Through this installation, Liselor Perez continues her exploration of the ties between intimacy, memory and identity. Her figures, fashioned from fabrics bearing bodily and domestic traces, oscillate between dolls, puppets and replica. They conjure a haunted world in which childhood, home and vulnerability become vehicles for a feminist and queer critique of the norms imposed on bodies, roles and genders. Blending softness with unease, attraction with repulsion, she transforms the booth into a theater of contradictions where viewers, caught in a web of scales and mirrors, find themselves dispossessed of their own place.

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Liselor Perez (b. 1999, Montélimar, France) lives and works in Paris. She graduated from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris in 2025, where she studied in the studio of Dominique Figarella, after receiving her BFA from Villa Arson in Nice in 2022. In 2023 and 2024, she also took part in a ceramics exchange program at Tokyo University of the Arts (Geidai).

This year, the artist has been selected to participate in the residency program at Villa Dufraine. In 2025, she received the 5th Rubis Mécénat Prize, through which she benefited from the critical support of guest curator Julia Marchand and a production grant for an installation presented at Saint Eustache Church in October 2025.

Her work is currently included in a group exhibition at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. This year, she also had her first solo exhibition at Sans titre in Paris. Perez has notably participated in group exhibitions at Frac Île-de-France, Romainville (2024), Palais des Beaux-Arts de Paris (2025), La Supérette, Centre d’art contemporain de Malakoff (2025), and Sans titre, Paris (2025 and 2023).