Basel Social Club Turns a Former UBS Training Center Into an Art Laboratory
Basel Social Club is using its fifth edition to ask a question that hangs over much of the contemporary art market: what happens when an art event keeps the sales structure, but rewrites nearly everything around it? In Basel, the week-long platform has taken over a former UBS training centre and filled it with work by more than 200 artists, while also staging a program that treats office life, labor, and leisure as material to be examined rather than simply endured.
The project has become known for generating buzz, but its co-founder, Yael Salomonowitz, frames its appeal more precisely as a matter of “focusing on an experience economy, while keeping art at front and centre.” That balance is visible throughout this year’s edition, which mixes nightlife and DJ sets with exercise classes, a cold plunge, and on-site cosmetic injections. The result is less a conventional fair than a deliberately unstable environment, one that blurs the line between exhibition, social scene, and workplace parody.
Among the 30 participating non-profit spaces, which make up just under 20 percent of exhibitors, is Or Associations, a new itinerant artist association registered in Basel. The group describes itself as a pilot organizational model that centers artists’ practices while positioning itself inside the commercial art world. Its structure is unusually direct: 50 percent of sale proceeds are used to fund members’ artistic practices.
Co-founder Gaby Sahhar says the association was created to “reclaim agency in a volatile market,” and to take advantage of its low overheads, itinerant format, and Switzerland’s generous artist grant system. Other members are already familiar with the gallery circuit. Sahhar has shown with Arcadia Missa, while founding members Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, who work as a duo, are represented by Amanda Wilkinson Gallery and have also exhibited at Thaddaeus Ropac. For them, the point is not to reject the market outright, but to alter the terms of participation.
That impulse runs through the project’s two-year pilot period, during which Or Associations plans to present a solo exhibition for each member, alongside group shows and events. It also intends to expand through international dialogue with artists, writers, and institutions. Lorenzo Bernet, founder of Zurich gallery suns.works, calls the project “a laboratory,” a useful description for a moment in which artist-run spaces are again proliferating, even as many of them begin to resemble the structures they once set out to replace.
This year’s Basel Social Club is especially attuned to the absurdities of labor in the gig economy, particularly for cultural workers. Its presentation asks, with a dry edge, “Shouldn’t you be working?” Basel Social Club, Erdbeergraben 1, runs until June 20.
