Basel Social Club Turns a Former UBS Training Center Into a Study of Work
In Basel, an abandoned multi-storey office building is hosting one of the fair week’s sharpest reflections on labor culture. This year’s edition of Basel Social Club occupies a former training center for UBS and uses the setting to examine the rituals, absurdities, and after-hours spillover of office life.
The presentation is built around the visual shorthand of the workplace: microwaved desk lunches, water coolers, neckties, and parking garages. But it does not stop at props or atmosphere. The program also includes nightlife, DJ sets, exercise classes, a cold plunge, and on-site cosmetic injections, creating a deliberately unstable space where work and leisure begin to look like variations of the same performance.
That tension gives the exhibition its force. Rather than treating productivity as a neutral ideal, Basel Social Club frames it as a system of habits, expectations, and self-management that can feel especially acute in the gig economy. The critique is likely to resonate with cultural workers, for whom the boundary between professional life and personal time is often porous, if not entirely erased.
The question posed by the presentation — “Shouldn’t you be working?” — is both comic and pointed. It captures the uneasy humor of a culture that celebrates flexibility while demanding constant availability, and it does so inside a building once dedicated to training employees for one of Switzerland’s largest banks.
Basel Social Club is at Erdbeergraben 1 through June 20. In a week crowded with spectacle, its most memorable gesture may be its insistence that the office is not just a place, but a mindset that follows people long after they leave the building.
