Every December for Art Basel, Miami turns into a temporary museum. But the works that pull me in most aren’t the canvases on the wall. It’s the installations that will line Miami Beach from Dec. 5 to Dec. 7 for Art Basel Miami 2025.
Coming from a live music and concert lover, I’m used to thinking about sound, light and bodies in motion, so when I walk into an installation, I can’t help but see it like a stage.
The way a piece controls brightness, color, silence and noise feels similar to how a great show builds tension across a setlist: there’s an opening moment that sets the tone, a central emotional peak and a kind of visual “outro” that lingers even after you’ve stepped back into the hallway.
At Art Basel and its satellite fairs, the installations that interest me most are the ones that understand this rhythm and treat viewers less like passive observers and more like an audience moving through a living artistic ecosystem.
That relationship between space and time is what makes installation work feel so alive. A painting waits for you. It assumes you’ll enter from a certain angle, maybe with your phone already in your hand.
I’m fascinated by artists who lean into that chaos and design environments that choreograph how people move and interact. Ones that use soundscapes that pull you deeper into a room, lighting that slows down your pace, or architectural elements that force you to double back.
In those moments, the work behaves like a venue, with built-in crowd control and intentional sightlines.
Part of why I’m drawn to this kind of art is that it feels like a way back to something I left behind. As a kid, I was always drawing, coloring and taking art classes, obsessed with filling sketchbooks and color-by-number pages.
Visual art was the first language I learned to express myself in, long before I ever stepped into a club or a concert pit. But somewhere along the way — between school, work and the pull of music — I stopped picking up brushes and markers.
I haven’t sat down with a coloring kit in years. Covering installations at Art Basel is, in a way, my way of reconnecting with that younger version of myself: the one who loved colors and shapes for their own sake.
Now, instead of creating the images myself, I’m interested in translating them,writing about how these immersive works feel from the inside. It’s beautiful to see how artists are using space, sound and movement as core materials.
In a week often overshadowed by celebrity cameos and party lineups, I invite you to take a moment to appreciate the installations that quietly reshape how we move, feel and remember Basel.