During Basel’s busiest week, when the city fills with fairs, openings, and endless appointments, SF Projects+ offers an alternative pace. From June 15–20, founders Floor van Eekeren and Sarah Schulten take over Haus Vischer Weber, a private residence in the heart of Basel, transforming it into an exhibition, gathering place, and contemporary salon centered on the idea of Our Collective Memory.
A Different Kind of Art Week in Basel
Sarah Schulten and Floor van Eekeren Portrait.
SF Projects+ Opening. Photo by Erna Drion.
Rather than presenting another tightly controlled curatorial statement, the project embraces a more personal approach. Each member of the curatorial committee was invited to select an artist with whom they share a genuine connection, creating an exhibition built from relationships rather than institutional frameworks. The result is a gathering of voices, experiences, and perspectives that reflects the complexity of memory itself.
Visitors encounter works throughout the rooms of the house, where art coexists with architecture, conversation, and everyday life. The setting removes the distance often created by traditional exhibition spaces, encouraging a more intimate form of engagement. Here, artworks are discovered in living rooms and hallways rather than white cubes, creating encounters that feel personal and immediate.
Collective Memory Through Personal Connections
Trevor Paglen, “Gornergletscher Hough Lines; Haar,” 2018, gelatin silver laser-exposed print. ©️ Trevor Paglen. Courtesy of the artist and SF Projects+.
The exhibition brings together a distinguished committee that includes Olivia Anani, Juan Enriquez, Clara Halperin, Rita Kingsmill Stuart, Alia Zaal Lootah, Loïc Villepontoux, Kulapat Yantrasast, and Karla Zerressen. Their selections create a dialogue that spans generations, disciplines, and geographies.
Among the more than twenty participating artists are Korakrit Arunanondchai, DRIFT, Noémie Goudal, Trevor Paglen, Asad Raza, and Hajime Sorayama, whose practices explore memory, technology, perception, and human experience from markedly different perspectives.
Korakrit Arunanondchai, title unknown. Courtesy of the artist and SF Projects+.
What unites the exhibition is not a singular aesthetic or narrative, but the relationships behind each inclusion. These personal connections become part of the exhibition’s structure, suggesting that memory is never entirely individual. Instead, it is formed through exchanges, conversations, and communities.
The theme feels especially relevant today. As technological systems increasingly shape how information is stored, retrieved, and understood, the exhibition asks what might be lost when human experience is reduced to data. Rather than presenting memory as something archived and fixed, Our Collective Memory proposes it as something living—constantly reshaped through encounters between people, places, and ideas.
SF Projects+ Revives the Salon as a Cultural Space
SF Projects+ Opening. Photo by Erna Drion.
SF Projects+ Opening. Photo by Erna Drion.
The project draws inspiration from the historical salon, a format that has long served as a catalyst for cultural exchange. As curator Rita Ouédraogo notes, salons have often functioned as spaces where unofficial knowledge is produced, where ideas circulate freely, and where communities gather outside formal institutions.
From A’Lelia Walker’s celebrated Dark Tower in Harlem during the 1920s to the gatherings hosted by James Baldwin in Provence and the convenings organized by Simone Leigh, salons have historically operated as places where culture is debated, expanded, and remembered collectively. Their significance lies not only in the conversations they host but also in the communities they bring together.
SF Projects+ Opening. Photo by Erna Drion.
At Haus Vischer Weber, that legacy is reimagined for the present moment. The exhibition extends beyond the artworks themselves through a week of shared experiences that includes morning swimming sessions, evening conversations in the garden, a performance, a dinner, and a party. These moments become part of the project’s larger inquiry into how memories are formed and preserved.
In an era increasingly defined by digital networks and algorithmic systems, SF Projects+ proposes something refreshingly analog: a house full of people, ideas, and artworks occupying the same space at the same time. The exhibition suggests that collective memory is not something stored elsewhere, but something created together—in rooms, around tables, and through conversations that continue long after the fair has ended.