Art as Present Tense: Marsalis & Budor Reframe the Stage

IN SOLO

At Art Basel Paris 2025, artists Jasper Marsalis and Dora Budor created installations that asked viewers not just to observe but to step into a continually shifting present. Marsalis’s project, blending audience-responsive video, motion-sensor tech, sculpture, and painting, became a living experiment about whose presence matters—and how performance and spectatorship blur within today’s attention economy. In this work, presence is never static; it’s negotiated in real time, reminding us that in the art world’s grand theatre, to be noticed is always to enter a dialogue with power and perception.​

Budor, meanwhile, transformed remnants of Paris’s cultural history into futuristic provocations: her “Vintages” video sculptures projected silent film fragments through lenses built from repurposed champagne boxes fusing nostalgia and critique to question what (and who) gets reproduced in the cycles of art enrichment. 

My Thoughts

My Thoughts: these artists remind us that presence is also about material choices and memory: the objects we gather, display, or repurpose. When histories collide with new digital tools and analog artifacts, every artwork can become both a present and a present an offering to, and a reflection of, a restless, watching world.​

FAMILY STYLE