Bastiaan Johan Christiaan "Bas Jan" Ader (19 April 1942 – disappeared 1975) was a Dutch conceptual and performance artist, and photographer.

Ader was lost at sea in 1975, attempting to cross the Atlantic Ocean from the American coast to England sailing in a thirteen-foot sailboat.

[citation needed] During adolescence, Ader took art classes at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, and later in the United States during a study abroad program.

The magazine featured "interviews" with nonexistent artists, such as "Brian Shitart", and pranks such as "expandable sculpture" which was five packing peanuts in an envelope.

[10] On 9 July 1975, Ader set off from Cape Cod and the U.S. state of Massachusetts in a 13 ft (4.0 m) modified "Guppy 13" pocket cruiser named Ocean Wave, to make his single-handed west–east crossing of the North Atlantic.

His brother Erik, an experienced ocean sailor, thinks that the fixed point on the boat to which his lifeline was attached was ripped out when he fell overboard in heavy weather.

[15] Ader held a two-person exhibition with William Leavitt at the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design (1972), a conceptual hotbed at the time, as well as a number of group exhibitions in Europe and the US with such artists as Leavitt, Ger van Elk, Gilbert & George, Jack Goldstein, Allen Ruppersberg, John Baldessari, and Marcel Broodthaers among others.

[16] Since his disappearance, Ader's work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at institutions worldwide including the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (1988), the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1993, 2006), Kunstverein München, Munich (1994, 2000), Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1994), Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2000), Portikus, Frankfurt (2003), and the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2004).

In 2006, Camden Arts Centre, London held a European retrospective of his works which travelled to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam and the Kunsthalle, Basel, Switzerland.

As seen through the eyes of fellow emigrant filmmaker Rene Daalder, the picture becomes an overview of contemporary art films, featuring work from artists Tacita Dean, Rodney Graham, Marcel Broodthaers, Ger van Elk, Charles Ray, Wim T. Schippers, Chris Burden, Fiona Tan, Pipilotti Rist and many others.