Timur Si-Qin at Art Basel Unlimited: the Pristine and the Sacred

At Art Basel Unlimited 2026, presented by Société, Timur Si-Qin unveils Mariposita, an immersive installation rooted in a single encounter with a living ecosystem in the Peruvian Amazon. Based on 3D scans of a Renaco tree and its surrounding pond in the Ucayali region, the work translates roots, insects, water, plant matter, and reflected light into a sculptural environment rendered at the scale of the living original. The project was realized in collaboration with Magician Space and with the support of the Sigg Art Foundation.

The German-born artist of Mongolian-Chinese descent has built a practice around some of the most urgent questions of our time: how we relate to nature, how belief systems shape our understanding of the world, and what forms of spirituality might emerge in an age defined by climate change and technological acceleration. Across sculpture, moving image, and his ongoing New Peace project, Si-Qin has consistently challenged the assumption that nature and technology exist in opposition to one another.

Mariposita marks a new chapter in that inquiry. Where earlier works sought universal forms, this installation remains grounded in a singular place, organism, and experience. Through acts of scanning, mirroring, and translation, Si-Qin transforms technological reproduction into a devotional gesture, inviting viewers to reconsider their relationship to the living systems that sustain them and to what he describes as the “pristine”—worlds so intact and interconnected that they can seem almost unimaginable from within contemporary life.


In conversation with Whitewall, Si-Qin reflects on sacred ecosystems, cultural and spiritual protocols, the role of beauty in contemporary art, and the possibility that art can help reimagine our relationship with the living world.

Timur Si-Qin on Encountering the Sacred in the Peruvian Amazon

WHITEWALL: Mariposita emerged from your time in the Peruvian Amazon and from an encounter with a living ecosystem that became the foundation of the work. Looking back on that experience now, what continues to resonate with you most deeply, and how did it shape the conceptual direction of the installation?

TIMUR SI-QIN: I return to the Peruvian Amazon every year, and during my most recent visit I felt as though I received the instructions for these works from that experience. It was one of those moments where the direction of the project did not feel imposed from the outside but seemed to emerge from the encounter itself. The ecosystem became more than a subject; it became a kind of guide. Mariposita ultimately grew out of that experience of paying attention, listening, and responding to something larger than myself.

“The ecosystem became more than a subject; it became a kind of guide,”

-Timur Si-Qin.

WW: You describe mirroring as an act of devotion. Historically, devotion has often implied a relationship to something sacred yet ultimately unknowable. How do you understand devotion within the context of an ecological reality that can be measured, mapped, and scientifically described?

TSQ: I don’t really agree that just because something can be mapped, or because there is a scientific dimension to nature, it somehow ceases to be sacred. For me, the sacred is much more immediate and much more simple: ecosystems themselves are sacred. The existence of scientific knowledge does not diminish that.

Maybe that’s an important distinction. The sacred does not necessarily depend on being completely unknowable—although I think there is always a dimension that remains mysterious. I think that is true of ecosystems and nature as well. The sacred is far more present in the world than we sometimes allow ourselves to recognize.

Nature, Technology, and Human Exceptionalism

WW: The notion of the “pristine” occupies a central place in this project. What does our continued fascination with the pristine reveal about contemporary culture’s relationship to nature, particularly at a moment when untouched landscapes are becoming increasingly difficult to imagine?

TSQ: This comes from many years of making renderings of landscapes. I would present them on light boxes and things like that. What was interesting to me was that I would try to recreate places I had seen during my travels, and sometimes the reaction would be that what I was depicting was fantastical, idealistic, or almost aspirational in a tourism-ad kind of way.

For me, that was an interesting reaction because the truth is that these places really do still exist. They are profound, and they are beautiful. It reflected the fact that most people, especially people in Europe and in Berlin, don’t have any experience being in these places.

I think you have to be at least one hour’s walk from the closest car to be in a place that is different. There is another level of natural place where things have a different quality. I think that is probably because the same species are expressed in a much more interesting or healthy way.

You can have the same bird, tree, or plant, and if you find it closer to the city, it looks one way. But if you find it at least an hour’s walk away, or further, in a remote place, they tend to be phenotypically much more expressed in beautiful and interesting ways.

Often people don’t see those versions of nature—the pristine versions. That is part of what I am trying to focus on in this body of work specifically.

WW: Much of your practice challenges the assumption that technology and nature exist in opposition to one another. What possibilities emerge when technology is understood not as a departure from nature, but as one of its expressions?

TSQ: Very often—basically all the time—my work is interpreted as being about nature and technology. But I always want to say that it is actually not about technology at all. It is about nature, and I am simply using technology to depict nature because it is what I have available.

In a sense, all art since the time of cave paintings has used technology to depict nature. So conceptually, my work is not really about technology. However, I do have things to say about it.

Fundamentally, this dualistic notion of nature versus human is one of the central anthropocentric distortions in how we conceptualize reality, and that leads to many problems. That is not to say that I am a techno-optimist. It is simply about understanding that technology is something that we, as humans, produce as an extended phenotypic expression of Homo sapiens.

In the same way that seashells create their shells, mineralize them, extract calcium from seawater, and build those structures, we are essentially doing the same thing. I think that is an important aspect of understanding how we actually affect the world.

The really pernicious thing I see is that, in the contemporary world, we like to scapegoat technology. We say, “Technology is this thing that is destroying the world.” But that is not really true. I mean, it is true physically and directly, but ultimately it is the culture that wields the technology.

There are different examples of cultures. Some cultures destroy nature, and other cultures protect nature. We have to recognize that there is that option, that difference. We have to learn how to hold the flame of technology without burning the web of life.

Cultural Roots of Ecological Belief

WW: Mariposita transforms a specific ecosystem into image, sculpture, and spectacle, yet it also asks viewers to slow down and look more carefully. How do you navigate the tension between attention and consumption, particularly within contemporary visual culture?

TSQ: I have always thought of the dynamics of attention and the attention economy as being a subset of a much broader attention ecology—something that has existed as long as there have been organisms.

In that sense, it is not really something new. It ultimately comes back to the question of how cultures direct and organize attention. But I think we are still operating within the same fundamental perceptual system that all animals do—and plants as well.

What I am trying to do is take something that genuinely deserves attention, which is the natural world, and give it enough spectacle that people actually stop and look. In a way, I am trying to draw attention toward something that might otherwise receive only a fleeting glance.

The challenge is how to hold that attention long enough for a deeper encounter to take place. If the work can encourage people to spend more time with something they might otherwise overlook, then it has done what I hoped it would do.

“The ecosystem became more than a subject; it became a kind of guide,”

-Timur Si-Qin.

WW: Your work frequently draws together scientific inquiry, spiritual imagination, and systems of cultural meaning. What do these different frameworks allow you to see that any one of them alone cannot?

TSQ: It is hard to say specifically what the result is, other than the result itself—the artworks. Of course, those works would not be possible without drawing from all of those influences.

Perhaps one way of approaching that question is through what I have been thinking about as cultural protocols. There is this idea of protocol art now, but that is something I have been working on for years in the sense of understanding cultural protocols more broadly. I think this goes beyond art as a protocol and extends to culture itself, and specifically to religion as a protocol.

I was born in Berlin, and when I was eight my mom married a Native American man and we moved to Arizona. I grew up in that Native American context. Before that, my dad is ethnic Mongolian Chinese, so I have always had this triangulation of German culture, Chinese—or Mongolian Chinese—culture, American culture, and Native American culture.

Being exposed to Native American culture, I encountered a culture that genuinely centers nature at the core of its religion and spirituality, as opposed to wider Western culture, which largely does not. Specifically in the American West, there is a form of Christian fundamentalism that I would describe as actively engaged in a war against nature. That contrast made me wonder where the difference comes from—why some cultures still see nature as sacred while others do not.

That question eventually led me to the story of the eight-century Christian missionary Saint Boniface. He famously went to a German tribe that was worshiping its sacred tree, chopped it down, and replaced it with a cross.

I think that is, in a way, the symbolic moment when Europeans lost nature at the core of their spirituality and replaced it with a man—an anthropocentric symbol represented by a piece of dead wood that is also a torture instrument.

In a way, all of my tree sculptures are trying to rekindle that original protocol that our culture needs to rediscover in order for us to survive the coming century.

Beauty as a Vehicle for Transformation

WW: Across projects such as New Peace and now Mariposita, there seems to be an ongoing search for new ways of relating to forces larger than ourselves. Do you see your work as proposing alternative belief systems, or as creating spaces in which belief itself can be reconsidered?

TSQ: I think the New Peace project was essentially an attempt to articulate what a contemporary nature-based cultural and spiritual protocol might look like.

My hope has always been that contemporary art can function as a kind of secular religion—an international secular religion—in the sense that it provides something that religion has historically provided.

I think spirituality is ultimately an emotion, and contemporary art, at its best, is capable of evoking that emotion. In that sense, it can create experiences that feel genuinely spiritual without necessarily belonging to a traditional religious framework.

Whether contemporary art can eventually evolve into a new vehicle for a spiritual protocol, I don’t know. Maybe that isn’t possible. But it seems to me that it would be one of the most organic directions for it to move in.

WW: Mariposita begins with a direct encounter with a living ecosystem, yet ultimately exists as a sculptural object. How do photography, scanning, digital modeling, and sculpture intersect within your process?

TSQ: My workflow is almost entirely digital. I do most of the fabrication through my gallery in Beijing, so apart from being out in the field collecting scans and source material, I am largely working from a computer.

I have been working with digital modeling since I was a teenager, but I also think of the work as a kind of photographic sculpture. Much of it is based on photogrammetry, which involves taking photographs from many different angles and combining them through software to create a three-dimensional form.

In that sense, the sculptures emerge directly from photographic processes. My background is actually in photography—I received my bachelor’s degree in photography, and at the time it was probably the most digital path one could take. Looking back, it feels less like a shift from one medium to another than a continuation of the same trajectory.

The sculptures are, in a way, an extension of a photographic practice. It is this photographic lineage that I have followed over the years into sculpture.

“I have always felt that beauty is still important, perhaps even necessary,”

-Timur Si-Qin.

WW: Much of your work seems concerned with how attention shapes our relationship to the world around us. At a moment when ecological crisis is increasingly visible, yet public attention remains fragmented, what role can art play in cultivating forms of attention capable of leading to genuine transformation?

TSQ: In a sense, that is exactly what I am trying to discover—and what I am trying to research through making this work.

One thing I have always seen my practice as being set against is what I would describe as the Cologne School anti-beauty position. That emerged in postwar Germany, passed through Cologne, and now informs a whole segment of the art world that remains quite influential.

I think that lineage fundamentally rejected beauty—the very idea of beauty. I have always felt that beauty is still important, perhaps even necessary.

In that sense, I do not subscribe to the idea that spectacle is inherently suspect, or that everything has to be filtered through irony, distance, or a kind of Protestant iconoclastic anti-beauty position. To me, that often leads toward a cynical relationship with the world and, ultimately, toward cynical artworks.

What interests me instead is the possibility that beauty, wonder, and even spectacle can become vehicles for attention. If something is capable of capturing attention and holding it, then perhaps it can also create the conditions for a deeper encounter with the world. That is not separate from the ecological questions I am interested in—it is part of them.

That is the direction I am trying to explore.