Are you feeling jaded about the machinations of the art industry? It may be time for a visit to Basel Social Club. Last year, the fourth edition of the free-wheeling event restored my faith in the art world, filling more than 100 rooms of a grand old bank with art from scores of venturesome international dealers. There were food stands, and quite a lot of alcohol, and—why not?—a barbershop. As always, it was free. The lines were, at times, considerable.
The multifarious event has also occupied a farm and a private villa in the past, and this time it has taken over a former UBS office building that was designed by the storied local firm Diener & Diener, right by the Basel SBB railway station. The offerings are at least as ambitious as last time. Programming will run from 4 p.m. until—no joke—3 a.m., every day through Saturday (Sunday morning, technically speaking).
“We started off this year thinking about doing something underground and doing a sort of night edition,” one of the event’s cofounders, Yael Salamunovitz, said during a video call on Friday evening. “There was a vision at a very early stage that we’re only open at night.”
An earlier performance of Alicia Framis’s The Walking Ceiling (2018), which was staged on the opening day of Basel Social Club . Courtesy the Artist and Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam. Photo: Gert Jan van Rooij
While the building’s above-ground floors are integral to the affair, there is an underground garage that will operate as a nightclub. Salamunovitz had just been there witnessing a “smoke test” and was now outside.
Over the course of the week, there will be performances in the garage by artists like Jade Kuriki-Olivo (Puppies Puppies) and Ernestyna Orlowska “who takes apart a MacBook to the sound of the Boléro in one of her performances,” Salamunovitz said. There will also be a bevy of concerts, including a stand late on Tuesday night by Robin S., whose debut single, “Show Me Love,” rocketed to number five on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1993. “We have an ongoing theme that we always have a one-hit wonder,” Salamunovitz said.
There’s a fitness center with a sauna and a cold plunge; private dining from the local chef Pascal Steffen, whose Roots restaurant has two Michelin stars; spray tans from something called Pureaurastudio; and a game show from the Zurich space Suns.Works that will apparently allow a lucky participant to win an Andy Warhol. Also, I Never Read, Art Book Fair Basel has taken up residence in the building. An outfit called Hotbling2go is offering live tooth-gem applications. And again, there is art, from dealers like P21 of Seoul, Soft Opening of London, 4649 of Tokyo, and many more.
“We probably couldn’t pull this off in any other place, to be honest,” another Basel Social Club cofounder, Robbie Fitzpatrick, said on the call. Thanks to grants and other forms of generosity—they got the venue free, as always—the organizers are able to keep costs down for exhibitors. “They’re not strapped by the pressure to make a profit after spending a considerable amount on a traditional fair booth,” Fitzpatrick said of those dealers.
A promotional image for Basel Social Club.
The team has hired senior citizens in the area, through a program called Seniors at Work, to serve as docents and guards. “Seamlessly, this becomes a commentary on aging and on being somebody elderly within an office context,” Salamunovitz said.
It all sounds even more action packed than last time. “The building itself is considerably larger” than last year’s bank, Fitzpatrick said. (And that bank was not exactly small.) This time, we “will never reach the max capacity,” he said. “Well, I say that—but who knows? There will probably still be a line, but we can accommodate more people.”
“This one, with this size of this building, is more than ever an invitation to just be—and experience the work, the social life, the bar, whatever it is,” Salamunovitz said, “and not try to find something or get somewhere, but to just go into it, get lost, go into the experience, and see where that takes you.”