BASEL, Switzerland— The sixth Basel edition of Volta, the cutting-edge satellite fair that tends to attract an international mixture of emerging galleries, was bounced this year from its former space at the landmark Markthalle, which is currently being converted to a shopping mall. Instead the event took refuge in the funky industrial park at Dreispitzhalle, where it still managed to deliver a youthful, laid-back atmosphere that was a refreshing contrast to the choreographed precision at the deluxe stands of Art Basel.

If you happen to miss the convenient shuttle van from the main fair, getting to Volta by tram and foot in the pouring rain builds character while challenging your commitment to contemporary art. Undeterred by the weather, ARTINFO made the trip to see the works on offer by the satellite's 81 galleries, a reduced lineup from the 110 that showed last year.

In a curtained viewing room, New York’s Priska C. Juschka Fine Art was screening two new high-definition videos by the Kazakhstan-born artist Almagul Menlibayeva, Milk for Lambs and Butterflies of Aisha Bibi. The exotic scenes and mythological narratives that the artist set in southern Kazakhstan — involving the 11th-century terracotta mausoleum of Aisha Bibi, a famed Sufi poet's daughter who is revered as a symbol of love — proved mesmerizing. Juschka sold two editions of each of the videos to European collectors for $15,000 apiece, as well as all three of the small copies of Wrapped in History, an edition that features a large Duratran print in a light box, at stepped prices of $10,000, $11,500, and $15,000, which increase as each edition is sold. “We’ve had amazing success with foundations and curators seeing the work,” said Priska Juschka.

Despite the seemingly isolated location of Volta's new home, Juschka pointed out that it was close to the stunning Herzog & de Meuron-designed Schaulager museum, where Matthew Barney’s exhibition “Prayer Sheet with the Wound and the Nail” has been drawing international crowds.

London’s Riflemaker Gallery had reserves from two museums for Naked Lunch author and artist William Burroughs’ sets of his Untitled File Folders, abstractions of water paint, ink, and acrylic on manila paper. Dated from between 1988–1992 and priced at £70,000 ($104,000), each set contains 30 drawings that Burroughs made while sitting near his typewriter at his farm in Lawrence, Kansas. Some works are embossed with the impressions of magic mushrooms, which Burroughs regularly consumed. The gallery also sold 18 copies of Jean Fontanive’s 2010 Livelinesse, comprised of 60 hand-painted animation cards depicting hummingbirds that are set in cleverly designed steel and brass frames, which were available for £3,500 ($5,190) apiece.

Fred Gallery, also of London, presented a solo show of Australian painter Martin Brown. In the first three days of the fair, the booth sold four of the artist's relatively small-scaled paintings of young London bands and figures from the music scene for between €4–8,000 ($4,960–9,910). Among the pieces that sold was the 2008 “Up Jumped the Devil” The Penetrators, an oil on linen measuring 25 by 30 centimeters that depicts a close-up view of three musicians performing, with one of them presenting his fiercely tattooed bald head to the viewer. “This is Brown’s first international art fair presentation,” gallerist Fred Mann said.

Copenhagen’s David Risley Gallery, which was formerly located in London, sold one of the best paintings at Volta, Turner Prize nominee Dexter Dalwood’s 2009 Death of Lincoln, to a European collector for $90,000. Composed of such elements as a found photograph of a wrecked theater and a painted interpretation of the top section of a famous 1873 Manet painting, the fuzzy image carries a lot of history, including reverberations of Lincoln’s assassination in 1865 at the Ford Theatre in Washington, D.C. Last year, Risley staged a solo show of Dalwood’s work, and this painting came courtesy of the Gagosian Gallery, which represents the artist.