Art Basel 2026’s strangest conversations are happening far from the blue-chip booths
Basel’s fair week has a way of turning the improbable into the memorable. This year, one of the most talked-about figures in the digital-art section Zero 10 is Soff, a fairy-clad presence who says she comes from the “Soff Multiverse” and visits the human world only occasionally. According to a booklet at the fair, Soff is “an interdimensional artist” building a game machine that would let users create their own “post-human body.”
Zero 10, dedicated to digital art, has drawn large crowds since opening earlier this week, and Soff seems to fit its atmosphere of speculative futures and playful self-invention. Her question — “Where is the future?” — lands less as a slogan than as a prompt, especially in a section built around art that imagines what comes next.
Elsewhere at Art Basel, the mood is more elegiac. Attendees have been marking the death of David Hockney, the British Pop art pioneer whose influence still radiates through the fair. One anonymous British artist was seen smoking in a dark corner of Messeplatz and praised Hockney for “flying the flag for us smokers,” while another tribute appeared on a journalist’s badge bearing one of Hockney’s favorite maxims: “End bossiness soon.”
At Basel Social Club, the fair’s off-site counterpart, the atmosphere tilts toward the whimsical and the bodily. Visitors can encounter a social wellness hub, live spray-tan applications, and Hotbling2Go’s tooth-gem service, which offers custom applications without reservations. A Swarovski Round costs SFr45, a small price for a little flash after a long day of viewing and conversation.
Not far away, the Welsh artist Angharad Williams is presenting fading untitled portraits of Diana, Princess of Wales, at the Milan-based gallery Fanta-MLN. The works, which include a blurred image titled “Diana (2026),” extend Williams’s interest in class, Welsh identity, and the royal family as a non-democratic institution.
And at Basel’s private airport, Lo Brutto Stahl has opened the third iteration of Air Service Basel 2026, on view until June 21. The project features works by 41 artists, including Franz Erhard Walther, Manon Wertenbroek, and Quay Quinn Wolf, and has now become a permanent part of the gallery’s Basel presence. In a week defined by spectacle, the airport show offers a slower, more unusual kind of arrival.
