Matthew Angelo Harrison: Proto

In Matthew Angelo Harrison’s “Proto,” the artist combines explorations of the personal and ancestral with politics and history. Encapsulating within blocks of resin African artifacts like ceremonial masks, spears, and giant totems, Harrison, treating his practice like a quest of scientific discovery, muses on the lasting effects of colonialism in the modern day. Using in his works items from the cultures of the Makonde, Dogon, Bambara, and others, this entrancing installation (on view at Kunsthalle Basel through September 26) will make viewers feel as though they are inside a museum of artifacts, though an underlying sense of urgency suggests that a reckoning with the darkness of the past is long since overdue.