Basel’s high-profile art week kicked off early on Sunday (June 15) with bratwursts at Maison CLEARING’s BBQ party, which celebrates the gallery’s tightly curated private exhibition staged in a villa just minutes from Messeplatz and the Rhine. It was followed by the sardine-packed opening of the latest edition of Basel Social Club.
CLEARING, now approaching its 15th anniversary, has a reputation for ambitious, research-driven programming and is a regular at Frieze and Art Basel. This year, however, the gallery opted for something different: a four-story off-site takeover of a rustic Basel villa, curated by Olamiju Fajemisin, CLEARING’s director of programs. Works hung indoors, salon-style, and spilled out into the garden, creating a far livelier and more engaging platform than the classic white-walled booth. Visitors to Maison CLEARING lingered or left and came back, catching performances and treating it more like a house party than a commercial affair. An interesting move for a gallery that once opened a Brussels space solely to get into Liste Art Fair, as founder Olivier Babin recalled.
In recent years, the gallery has experimented with ways to be present in Basel without having to foot Art Basel’s big-ticket bill (or face the potential ego bruising of Art Basel’s rigorous selection process). It has been until now a fixture at Basel Social Club, which was launched in 2022 by a coalition of artists, curators and gallerists. It is, for those unfamiliar, everything the art fair isn’t: communal, egalitarian, free and radically open to the public. No VIP lists, no special treatment—just a pulsing crowd moving through installations and performances with drinks in hand. Staff roam the year’s venue, a former private bank, in T-shirts declaring “Burn galleries not calories,” lest anyone erroneously assume the alt event is in any way associated with the mega fair.
After last year’s wildly experimental field-first Farm edition, Basel Social Club has planted itself squarely in the heart of the city, taking over Vontobel. The historic building is engagingly labyrinthine, with more than one hundred rooms filled with artworks that riff on its past life as a financial institution. This year’s theme could not be more timely: money, value and a pointed interrogation of the fragile fictions upholding capitalism. Each participating gallery was asked to respond directly to the language of finance, probing systems of commerce, accumulation and trade. The result is a sprawling exhibition, performance program and culinary free-for-all that collapses boundaries between currency and care, luxury and necessity, spectacle and service with wit and charm.
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At the opening, visitors wandered the halls with paper plates topped by Koons-inspired balloon dogs (made from real balloons). Observer tracked down the source: a cheeky “Koons Special Sale” by Korean artist Dahoon Nam, who, in a live factory-like setup, was selling balloon dogs at 0.01 percent of the original Koons price. A literal inflation joke and a pointed critique of art-as-investment, the piece skewered the absurdity of value construction in the art market, grinning all the while.
Elsewhere, on the ground floor, a video installation by Thai artist Naraphat Sakarthornsap, presented by SAC Gallery, set a more meditative tone. Nestled in a lush display of Swiss delphiniums, Sakarthornsap’s screen loops a quiet but cutting spoken monologue of articles on agriculture, labor and the global flower trade, eventually revealing that the seemingly native blooms were, in fact, imported from Thailand. The installation confronts the viewer with uncomfortable truths about global imbalance, showing how structures of aesthetic and economic value are shaped by local narratives yet driven by transnational flows. Our daily desires and habits, Sakarthornsap posits, are the real engines behind extractive systems.
Doubling down on experimental presentations, this year’s fair also includes performative installations that cross into the realm of social engagement. Among them is Barbershop: Live Salon by British Jamaican artist and barber Faisal Abdu’Allah. Presented by Harlesden High Street and Kendra Jayne Patrick, the ongoing performance transforms the act of cutting hair into a platform for exchange—opening conversations around identity, representation and belonging. The piece is part of the broader program It’s a Whole Lotta Money (in this muf**er) that Abdu’Allah previously presented at the Venice Biennale and Tate.
In the same participatory vein, artist Alberto Papparotto has set up a nail salon on the same machine the bank once used to shred documents. Located downstairs, the installation functions both as a space of self-care and a conceptual gesture, transforming a tool of institutional erasure into one of intimate embellishment.
Basel Social Club seems to take Koyo Kouoh’s recent assertion that the art world is tired of words quite seriously. One of the more unexpected installations is the Recovery Zone, a fully functioning sauna and wellness space conceived by Keen Wellbeing. Here, visitors can experience works like a neon installation by Sylvie Fleury while participating in guided 30-minute sessions that include breathwork, ice baths and saunas. There’s no fee—“just come as you are and leave recharged,” the organizers say.
For those seeking a more introspective form of recovery, artist Victoria Colmegna’s Homeopathic & Therapy Pharmacy offers a quasi-clinic where astrology, tarot, Lacanian analysis and New Age practices converge. In a similarly restorative key, the Liquide Chamber—curated by Nathalie Rebholz and Jeanne Graff—invites visitors into an immersive, softly lit environment of sound works that explore the fluid dimensions of relaxation and contemplation.
More than just a fair, Basel Social Club’s many activities this year unfold as a broader exploration of how artists share, exchange and activate their work. Many projects on view this week explore alternative models of distribution, intentionally positioning themselves as more human-centered than market-centered. While galleries do pay to participate and may pursue follow-up sales, the atmosphere is far from transactional. The organizers have created an immersive environment that feels closer to a creative gathering or temporary community than a traditional art fair.
Norwegian artist Tobias Kaspar, for instance, invites visitors to donate garments, which he will rebrand and incorporate into the thirteenth chapter of his ongoing Biography Collection before redistributing them free of charge. In doing so, he questions systems of value, authorship and credit, while proposing alternative exchange cycles rooted in circulation rather than accumulation.
For those drawn to more irreverent experiences, Basel Social Club has a functioning casino this year, discreetly tucked upstairs. At its center is a live poker table, surrounded by Paul Levack’s psychedelic, casino-themed paintings—a surreal mise-en-scène where play and performance converge.
Those who’d like to remember their Basel adventures forever on their skin should find the ground floor group exhibition curated by Alana Alireza and Geraldine Belmont featuring artist-designed, hand-poked tattoo editions. More than twenty artists—including Sylvie Fleury, Liam Gillick, Louisa Gagliardi, Filwa Nazer, Shuang Li and Cudelice Brazelton IV—contributed works, some offered as limited editions, others as one-time-only creations. Now in its third iteration, after previous presentations in Zurich and at Kunsthaus Zürich’s Lange Nacht der Muse, the project draws inspiration from the legendary 1990s Tattoo Collection at Air de Paris initiated by Gilles Dusei. It proposes an alternative mode of art circulation rooted in intimacy, ritual and bodily inscription.
If it all sounds a little too precious, keep in mind that Basel Social Club has plenty of moments of genuine depth. Larkin Erdmann presents an elegant selection of Man Ray assemblages, while The Gallery of Everything’s Collection Room features a salon-style hanging that places modernist and contemporary works into dialogue across time and geography. Meanwhile, Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger offers a quietly powerful presentation of ink drawings by the Basel-born painter Irène Zurkinden (1909-1987) that are intimate, visceral reflections on sexuality and desire, rendered from a modern and deeply personal female perspective.
Among the most compelling discoveries we encountered at the fair is the presentation by Thousand Plateaus Art Space of paintings by emerging Chinese artist Rao Weiyi. In a series of enigmatic, psychologically charged works, Rao captures the isolation and alienation felt by many in his generation, while also expressing a longing for more intimate and authentic forms of connection. In his European debut, small-scale, emotionally resonant paintings blend internal and external worlds, offering a complex portrait of contemporary subjectivity. His work resists the numbing saturation and fragmented attention of today’s image culture, instead proposing a more vulnerable, emotionally grounded reading of reality.
Miami-based gallery Andrew Reed, at Basel Social Club for the first time, has brought atmospheric mixed-media landscapes by British artist Sam Creasey. Romantic and luminous in tone—evoking the light and mood of Turner—these scenes are subtly interrupted by dark, totemic ceramic forms, introducing tension and ambiguity into otherwise serene environments. These gestures destabilize the image and invite viewers into a more symbolic, open-ended interpretation. “I was particularly interested in the collegial feel of Basel Social Club, where curators placed the works independently from the galleries,” Reed told Observer, explaining why he chose this platform over Basel’s more conventional fairs. “It’s led to great conversations with peers, including Sweetwater,alongside whose program Sam Creasey’s work is included.”
Equally witty and timely are the action figures of contemporary icons crafted by Jeffrey Dallesandro. Starting from actual toys, Dallesandro creates miniature versions of figures like Donald Trump, Simon de Pury and Dua Lipa, which are sold in custom boxes with interchangeable parts: alternate facial expressions, hand gestures and poses that playfully exaggerate their power. “This is actually one of the first times I’m showing in a fair or working with a gallery,” he told Observer, explaining that his work has primarily circulated online, where he sells directly via Instagram. Dallesandro doesn’t even describe himself as an artist. Instead, he frames the project as a form of social practice and a coded act of dissent that uses humor to confront the paradoxes of politics and celebrity culture. That said, the pricing aligns with art world expectations more than with toy aisle tags: individual figures sell for $4,000 and, by way of example, the full Trump assassination attempt diorama costs $25,000.
Another psychologically charged installation comes from Sophie Jung, who presents a haunting scene centered around a rusted vintage carousel house, set inside a quiet, nostalgia-laden room. Inside, a book by Jung rests among elements described by the artist as “archetypal prisoner of the carousel, ancestor’s biography, iron pole, c-print negative, music box, horse hair, eagle death spiral projection, descendant’s cries, techno beats.” The piece reads like a mournful eulogy for childhood, perhaps, or for a vanished era of European prosperity and illusion.
Amid rising participation costs, uncertain returns and increasingly demanding entry requirements, Maison CLEARING and Basel Social Club offer well-considered alternatives to the hyper-inflated main fair and its ever-expanding list of orbiting satellites. Prioritizing active social engagement and more meaningful forms of exchange, they reflect a growing sentiment in the art world that the endless cycle of global art fairs offering variations of the same experience is losing its appeal.
Maison CLEARING and Basel Social Club run through Sunday, June 21.
