Basher is one of several New Zealand artists to return home in the light of global events, many of them with well- forged international careers. Expatriatism is a perennial feature of New Zealand art history—often said to be a response to a deficiency in local arts infrastructure—and so this moment is significant in that it marks the reversal of this trend and tradition: people are flowing in, not out. Though for Basher the decision to return was primarily a question of lifestyle, of where life for him and his family was liveable and safe, he says that the move didn’t feel like a retreat, sacrifice or compromise of his professional ambitions. Talking to the artist, then, it is apparent that this moment is also one which invites us to rethink what it is to make and share art in and from Aotearoa.

New Zealand’s ‘isolation’, for one, is of no issue to Basher, who is currently represented by both Starkwhite in Auckland and Anat Ebgi in Los Angeles and who has worked across multiple localities for his entire career. He first moved to the United States in 1999, where he began his studies at Columbia University during a period he describes as “the height of MFA studio madness”, and which others have likened to an NBA-draft-style approach to art investment. Figures like Charles Saatchi would conduct studio visits looking to expand their portfolios, launching the careers of artists like Dana Schutz and Barnaby Furnas. Basher therefore became acquainted with art, and its incumbent economy, in the thick of things.

He cites his involvement in this space and relationships with these people as formative experiences, but he also maintains many relationships here. Basher doesn’t buy the argument that New Zealand is somehow excluded from these exchanges on the basis of its size or location. This is something that Covid-19 made clear, he says. “Our prior assumptions around being physically present in a place aren’t actually correct.”

On the other hand, the other major thing Covid has underscored is the importance of seeing artwork in person. This was the other major drawcard for making the shift back home. New Zealand is one of few places in the world right now where art can be made for and experienced in a physical, communal setting. Seeing Kate Newby’s exhibition YES TOMORROW at the Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi was, for Basher, a recent homecoming highlight. “A stupendously good exhibition, in a space!” he told me excitedly. The importance of in-person encounters should not be understated. For Basher, whose practice is in part display-based, this is especially true.

Working with both painting and sculptural installation, Basher is interested in the production of space through a highly strategised commercial grammar that activates, subtly, near-primal desires and longings. His is a subversion of this language; a language of the capitalist sublime, where things are sleek and frictionless, comprised of seductive colours and luminous, reflective surfaces. Painting in a graphic and disciplined manner, Basher seems almost to dematerialise his medium: in his most recognisable works, vertical beams in magenta and ochre hues melt into and ascend from glowing white spaces, evoking the infinite and untroubled ‘space beyond’, which consumer goods and experiences often promise.

Covid-19 presents both challenges and new spaces for Basher’s practice—there is an emerging grammar to be investigated. In many ways, the pandemic has dematerialised space further, shifting commercial encounters online and thereby expanding the suffocating presence of mega-retail companies like Amazon at the expense of small local businesses. Commerce and consumption are changing, but sadly in much the same spirit as before the pandemic. The great American hyper- capitalist experiment trundles on, wounded in some ways, but becoming in others increasingly extractive and indifferent to human cost. The digitisation of the art market is one such emergent feature: art fairs have been moving online and technologies like cryptoart have expanded. Both trends are helping to further entrench financial incentives in these commercial art spaces, crowding out the communal and relational qualities which usually make them tolerable.

Basher therefore has a lot to think about—but also a lot to process before he can think about making, he tells me. He describes his most recent project as “a still-life show”, focused on the “visually immediate” by way of botanical forms and compositions that he sees as a step back from, and way of dealing with, the weight of the past five years of the Trump presidency and now Covid. Though he believes in the value of a socially engaged practice, and has established an incisive one, he is also weary of reactionism and is in no rush to synopsise the pandemic experience through his work.

Being back in Aotearoa with the sea breeze blowing through his studio has offered Basher perspective on the chaos and some much-needed space to exhale while watching the tides and seabirds. Mostly, it has given him an understanding of “how utterly entire the experience of Covid is” and how differently placed we are in New Zealand relative to the rest of the world as a result of the government’s effective pandemic management. With the exception of the nationwide Level 4 lockdown last year, the pandemic has not been as all-encompassing here as elsewhere, nor as traumatic. Economically, obviously, it has still been immensely difficult, especially for small businesses, the tourism sector and those in events and performing arts, but here a trip to the store doesn’t, for most, entail the potentially fatal health risks that it does in many countries.

“Cultural production in New Zealand after this will be in a unique and not entirely straightforward position,” Basher speculates. “We are operating from elsewhere.” In a sense, this position is not new at all: New Zealand has always imagined itself as ‘elsewhere’ in the world, but this is no longer necessarily euphemistic for ‘peripheral’ or ‘irrelevant’, nor reason for cultural cringe. According to Basher and many others returning from overseas, New Zealand’s pandemic response was widely acclaimed, almost romanticised in the international media, being so far from that of most countries that it seemed almost make-believe. Far from isolating us further from the global experience, Basher thinks this reputation has created a real interest in what is happening here, and therefore an opening through which New Zealand can “push itself out as a leader of cultural production” to establish a strong creative identity, one that is not, for once, couched in self-deprecation.

Basher’s current challenge is to join the other artists and makers living in Aotearoa, resident or returning, in measuring and tracing out of this new elsewhere as we reflect on the pandemic and confront its repercussions. This means making the most of our uniqueness and the high-quality creative thinking and workmanship in abundance here, and importantly, it means working within the rhetoric of kindness and community that has already distinguished us in this critical, world-shaping moment.

For Basher, appreciative of how fortunate he is to have roots in New Zealand, this is first a matter of reacquainting himself with the country and the ways in which it has changed in the 20 years since his departure, namely into a more diverse nation with a strong sense of place within the Pacific. But before that, even, it is a matter of decompressing. Though he has a solo show scheduled at Starkwhite in April, Basher is still enjoying the space that Covid has allowed him “to step back from production and deadlines”, particularly within his US networks, where no show is guaranteed to go ahead. Among the many casualties of the pandemic, this loss of certainty—or the semblance of certainty—has been the one many of us have felt most acutely. Basher has spent the past year “coming to terms with having less control” and “just letting it happen”. In short: the tides still rise as they always do, but now he’s inviting them into his studio.