Basel Social Club returns for its fifth edition from June 14–20, 2026, transforming a vacant multi-story office building designed by Diener & Diener, just minutes from Basel SBB train station, into a temporary social stage for art.

This year’s edition reconsiders the workplace not as a site of production, but of critical reflection. Once a symbol of efficiency and growth, the office today reflects shifting realities shaped by digitalization, remote work, and artificial intelligence. Basel Social Club engages this condition through exhibitions, performances, music, gastronomy, and informal encounters that explore questions of labor, time, productivity, and rest.

Unfolding vertically across the building’s stacked floors, the architecture becomes part of the curatorial framework. Spatial layers and circulation routes echo contemporary notions of the “underground” — as both a site of cultural resistance and a metaphor for the hidden structures and tensions of late capitalism.

The building remains continuously activated throughout the week, with artists responding directly to its architecture and atmosphere. A dedicated night program expands the experience into the late hours, while an “Out of Office” zone offers space for pause and retreat.

Sunday, June 14: 2 PM – 3 AM
Monday, June 15 – Saturday, June 20: 4 PM – 3 AM

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Through the consideration of patterns of habit, memory, and collecting, Jesse Gouveia’s (b. 1992) practice examines the way we recollect our past and how we graph and archive mental records. From recreation to documentation, Gouveia steps between dimensions of memory and reconstruction. Gouveia’s exhibitions include Plaid, anonymous gallery (2024); Photography Then, anonymous gallery, New York (2023), Higher Power curated by K.O. Nnamdie, New York (2021). Recent press include Financial Times, Office Magazine, and reviews from the The New York Times.

Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo) was born in 1989 in Dallas, TX, and currently lives and works in New York City. The artist received her BA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010 and her MFA from Yale University in 2014. Kuriki-Olivo’s work is rooted in a conceptual practice that takes many forms including performances, installations, sculptures, drawings, paintings, and community organizing. The artist’s work questions standard notions of what is and isn’t art, blurs lines between the personal and public, and explores the performance of identity as it’s mediated through the commodities and media we consume and surround ourselves with.

Lingrou Xie (b. 1999, Zhanjiang, Guangdong, China) is a painter whose work explores themes of transformation, vulnerability, and emotional memory through imagined ecosystems of hybrid beings and evolving life forms. Drawing from a deeply personal and introspective perspective, she creates psychologically charged worlds where fantasy and lived experience converge, using invented creatures as vessels for tenderness, resilience, and self-reflection. Her paintings are marked by a distinctive visual language that balances playful imagination with emotional depth, investigating processes of growth, adaptation, and becoming. Xie received her BFA in Painting from Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts and her MFA from the Expressionist Painting Studio at Capital Normal University in Beijing. Her work has been exhibited throughout China and internationally, and she currently lives and works in Beijing.

Elliot Reed (b.1992) is an artist, based in New York working across video, dance, performance, and sculpture. He received his MA in Choreography from Master EXERCE ICI-CCN in Montpellier, France, and was a member of The Whitney Museum ISP 23-24 cohort. Elliot is a danceWEB scholar, 2019–20 Artist in Residence at the prestigious Studio Museum in Harlem and part of the museum’s permanent collection. Reed was also the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. Recent gallery and museum exhibitions include anonymous gallery , Kunsthaus Glarus, Lucerne Festival with JACK Quartet, Metro Pictures, MoMA PS1, OCD Chinatown,, The Getty Center, Hammer Museum, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, The Broad, and performances in Tokyo, Osaka, London, Mexico City, Vienna, and Hamburg.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:  

Puppies Puppies (Jade Guarano Kuriki-Olivo) , Jesse Gouveia , Elliot Reed , Lingrou Xie .