In the recent hit horror film The Backrooms, characters slip into an infinite maze of apparently mundane rooms populated by strange objects in inexplicable configurations. These vaguely ominous “liminal spaces” came to mind as I attempted to navigate Basel Social Club‘s fifth edition, held this year in a disused UBS corporate office building, late on Wednesday night.
Are we still underground? Should we go upstairs now, or continue down that narrow corridor? Did someone mean to put that thing there? Why is this room so oddly shaped? Is that person real?
Basel Social Club 2026. Photo: Jo Lawson-Tancred.
These were just some of the questions that entered my mind as a seemingly endless number of rooms stretched before me, each containing an installation more intriguing than the last. The only thing preventing my total disorientation, amid a steady stream of giggling Swiss Gen Zs, was the odd recognizable art world figure.
Chloe Wise sculpture at Basel Social Club 2026. Photo: Jo Lawson-Tancred.
There were plenty of highlights scattered throughout the nearly unnavigable building. If you wanted to see Chloe Wise‘s “Extrasensory” show at the KBH.G, but don’t have many hours to wile away from the Messeplatz, a tiny taster of her work is on the ground floor, several stories up from the underground entrance to the fair.
Hidden away in a glass annex—one of many spots where you feel like you are both prying and being watched—is a single-channel snippet from the Canadian artist’s new Alien Melodrama film installation. With Wise herself starring as extraterrestrial Edith, the wry, retro drama takes the idea of an alien encounter to absurdist extremes. The KBH.G show, across town, seeks to unpack how our shifting cultural projections onto nonhuman-entities will always tell us more about ourselves that anything else. This amuse-bouche was simply good fun.
Nick Doyle installation at Basel Social Club 2026. Photo: Jo Lawson-Tancred.
If there is a conversation starter at this year’s Basel Social Club, it was surely Nick Doyle‘s futuristic kink bar, Human Resources (2024), presented by Brussels’s Stems Gallery. The greyscale installation, constructed from repurposed cubicle walls, ceiling panels, and replete with filing cabinets, plays so perfectly into the theme of corporate drudgery that it was hard to know where it ended and UBS’s real workspace began.
Roll in for a cup of “blood,” “sweat,” or “tears,” but with a twist. Spin the wheel of chance to randomly select one of hundreds of fetishes that have been tidily filed away by Doyle. The Instagram-ready-winner is the chance to get locked into the bar by the neck, as your floating head sips cocktails from a Louboutin. What subversive desires lurk behind shiny surfaces? And who can resist a little power play?
Vincent Moulinet’s interactive installation at Basel Social Club 2026. Photo: Jo Lawson-Tancred.
The naughtiness continues downstairs with Vincent Moulinet‘s Daddy loves you too (2026), an interactive installation courtesy of Munich’s Caldo Worldwide. The French new media artist makes new worlds with game engines, and this one is an interactive simulation of our mass surrender to the powers that be.
It’s a reality that is hard to really eroticize in a world of trillionaires, but one semi-redacted email, printed and stuck to a nearby wall, is too reminiscent of the Epstein files to leave much room for ambiguity. In it, the accused, older author insists “the domination you accuse me of is hypocritical[…] that’s exactly what you wanted.” Moulinet urges us to resist being crushed and lied to by the patriarchal machine.
Xiao Guo Hui paintings at Basel Social Club 2026. Photo: Jo Lawson-Tancred.
Contemporary twists on Van Eyck‘s Adam and Eve panels by Xiao Guo Hui, brought by Zurich dealer Fabian Lang, stood out. It doesn’t hurt to have a quick reminder of the medieval in such an unnervingly sterile, labyrinthine concoction of the modern age as this never-ending office space. The Canadian-Chinese artist’s Martyrs of Beauty offers up five different body-enhancers—or mutilators, an accompanying text dares suggest—stripped down and flung, shame-faced, from the garden of Eden.
Also presented by Lang were some excellently eerie cardboard cutouts of random, “Non-Player Character” types by Mark Wallinger. These background figures are so generic that the brain initially accepts them, until suddenly something starts to feel off. This time, the works feel almost like an intentional nod to The Backrooms.
Bernat Daviu’s installation at Basel Social Club 2026. Photo: Jo Lawson-Tancred.
A painter first and foremost, Bernat Daviu seems nonetheless cynical about the fate of most canvases. It must be why he has apparently few qualms about displaying his own work in a mock-waiting room, a space where the eye only entertains art as a desperate plea for distraction. The installation, from 2021 and presented by Barcelona’s Bombon Projects, is meant to be a commentary on the still, unchanging nature of painting, as well as the medium’s persistence long after its oft-proclaimed death.
Basel Social Club 2026. Photo: Jo Lawson-Tancred.
One man, tilted back with his head resting on his hand, sat completely still the entire time I was there. I’m still not sure whether he was part of the work. A couple rows behind him, two other visitors cackled with joy when they discovered that a nearby water cooler was apparently filled with alcohol.
Basel Social Club runs from 4 p.m. until midnight, with an underground club that stays open to 3 a.m., through Saturday, June 21 at Erdbeergraben 1, Basel.