I went by Nina Beier's piece Tragedy in the Art Unlimited section of Art Basel about five times before I actually saw it. The piece is a spotlit carpet, and occasionally, at the right moments, a dog handler leads in a dog and instructs it to 'play dead' on the carpet - which it does beautifully well. It's a strange thing, waiting for a creature to perform its own death, but the work is an elegant display of the way in which we make ourselves and other things into images. Surprisingly enough - whilst I would never usually mention Beier and Richard Phillips in the same breath, the latter's film First Point, featuring the notoriously off-the-rails starlet Lindsay Lohan, displayed a shared interest in the transformation of something living into an image. Ostensibly Lohan plays a surfer in the film, yet it's laughably obvious that the surfer whose feet we see on the board, head cut off, is not the actress, who we see twiddling her hair extensions and trying to look as seductive as possible. She looks as though she's trying really hard to act, and doing it badly; it's unclear how much Lohan is in on this - though, having seen (the teen flick) Mean Girls (2004), in which she seemed perfectly capable, I have to imagine she is. Phillips renders the actress pure image - absolutely unable to surf the wave - only able to be the face of it.

But while certain types of images, such as those of Lohan, pervade these days, others are lost. Runa Islam's silent 16mm film Emergence sees an image from a found broken glass negative developing in a dark room, as we begin to make out a picture of a square in Tehran in which dogs seem to scavenging around the carcasses of horses, indicating that a violent event has taken place. David Claerbout's Orchestra (2011) is a still image in a very dark space that somehow looks like a film - of an orchestra preparing to play. Several times, while I was looking at this work, I thought I heard instruments, or thought I saw the image move. Perhaps it's something to do with the subject matter itself - the moment of quiet before the action - that makes us anticipate music and movement.

On the fun side, Cosima von Bonin's The Bonin/Oswald Empire's Nothing#03 (CVB's Fatique Raft & MVO's White Rabbit Song (2010) is a platform on which a cast of soft toy character's sit - a lazy white bunny with 'SLOTH' on its feet and some oysters with eyes. Above are speakers playing different pieces of music by electro compoaser Moritz von Oswald, which adds a strange party-like atmosphere to the rather sad characters. Shimabuku's Fish & Chips (2006/8) is a sweet film in which a fish interacts with a potato that has been dropped in the sea - the two are only ever destined to meet on land after the fish's death. Franz West's enormous pink sculpture dominates the hall - Gekröse (2011), a bulbous looping knot of a sculpture that seems to be consuming (or having sex with) itself. An excellent work to preside over an art fair, you might say, but there was much worth seeing in Unlimited.