This year, the threshold between the glittering halls of accumulation inside Art Basel and the city outside is defined by Nairy Baghramian's commission at Messeplatz. The work initially appears almost to withdraw from attention: mirrored stainless steel armatures, low-slung benches, forms that recede into light and circulation, and subtle details such as flies printed onto porcelain surfaces. Nothing announces itself as monumental.
This slow ignition is crucial. The mirrored steel armatures, depending on the time of day, partially disappear. They behave less like objects than like conditions of visibility. The sculpture is relational in its timing, initiating a sequence of bodily decisions—whether to sit, whether to remain standing, whether to enter a choreography that is already underway.
Nairy Baghramian, Modèle vivant (S’empilant), 2026. Installation at the Messeplatz during Art Basel in Basel 2026
Elena Filipovic, Pauline Pobocha and André Rottmann talked about Baghramian’s work at Art Basel Conversation, which took place behind the 010 exhibition for Tech collectors, providing a drastic recording of the attentive faculties: a physical encounter, instead of subsumption into the growing omniverse of AI slop. At first, no one sits. The sculpture remains formal, even distant—an arrangement of surfaces that resists immediate legibility. Then, one body interrupts the uncertainty, then another. Within minutes, the configuration shifts, and the benches fill. As Pobocha puts it, “you encounter the work working,” a formulation that captures how agency emerges as a quantity distributed between object and use, rather than inheriting solely in either alone.
Rottmann’s reference to Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais helps articulate the register in which these figures operate: suspended, burdened, assembled through tension rather than resolved into monumentality. Baghramian’s citizens are not presented as stable bodies but as arrangements of support and vulnerability—leaning, adjusting, sharing weight with structures that remain visibly provisional.
Berni Searle, Profile, 2002. Installation view at Unlimited, Art Basel. Courtesy of PSM Gallery
Across the fair, this attentiveness to fatigue becomes a kind of background frequency. By the time one reaches “Unlimited” on a Monday afternoon, exhaustion is among the most honest forms of relation available. Berni Searle’s hanging semitransparent lambda prints—priced at €60,000—seem to absorb this collective condition: transparent surfaces where traces linger and overlap, recalling the layered inscriptions and histories that Profile renders visible on the body. The market display itself oscillates between spectacle and logistics, a space where curatorial ambition often takes on the texture of administration.
Ruba Katrib’s contribution appears less as a unifying intellect than as a mediator maintaining fragile compatibility between productions that might otherwise collapse under their own weight. It recalls Spike Island curator Clementine Proby’s self-description on Instagram as a “fancy secretary,” a precise diagnosis of the curator’s role: coordinator of aesthetic labor at the mercy of wealth stratification. Yet the inequalities inscribed within contemporary art still allow moments of unapologetic pleasure to surface, as when imagining the sun catching Oskar Schlemmer’s Homo, Composition in Metal (1930–31) on a surprisingly theatrical white wall. Presented by Leandro Navarro and Thaddaeus Ropac, the work arrives carrying its own market history, having sold at Lempertz last year for €163,800. Nearby, Isa Genzken’s sculptures at Galerie Buchholz introduce a counter-temporality of intimacy before disappearing once more into circuits of private ownership. Elsewhere, a wired sculptural system at Statements unfolds through an artificial dream logic, suggesting that illusion remains one of contemporary art’s most durable technologies. Illusion—and its inevitable disillusionments—was one of the fair’s recurring motifs.
Ramón Saturnino, Bulgaria - mexicali (9:01 pm) , 2022 - 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Lodos, Mexico City
The absence of the Baloise Prize in 2026 generated murmurs across Statements, not least because galleries learned of its cancellation rather late. Yet Ramón Saturnino’s presentation at Lodos Gallery transcends the ambient frustration. You, neighbor God, if sometimes in the night, I rouse you with loud knocking, I do so only because I seldom hear you breathe (2025) assembles wire, plaster, photography, and concrete into a landscape that feels simultaneously geological and political. Tiny photographs retreat into the delicate texture of white photographic paper, as though reluctant to fully reveal themselves. The US–Mexican border appears here as material residue, its memory carried by filigree metal threads anchored to a modest concrete base. Priced at $40,000 for the installation, with individual photographs at $4,500 and the sculptural element at $8,500, the work stages distance as both a physical and affective condition. It brings to mind a conversation I had with Émile Rubino about the subtle ways he inserted traces of his own presence into the leporello of Brunette Coleman’s Image as Trace II: interventions that gently destabilize the certainty of representation. Saturnino’s archive of Bulgaria–Mexicali similarly proposes belonging as something negotiated through absence, displacement, and the fragile persistence of images.
Margherita Moscardini, Installation view at Gian Marco Casini's booth, Liste Art Fair. Photo: AWC
At Liste Art Fair, I crossed the waves of a vibrant opening crowd to shelter myself in the discreet intervention of Margherita Moscardini at Gian Marco Casini. These paper notes turned into bronzes (€6,000 each) revolve around a deceptively simple question: can sculpture become a territory exempt from state sovereignty? The video And Remember That Holes Can Move documents a summit of legal scholars debating precisely this proposition. Around it, reliefs translate legal concepts into sculptural form, the installation priced at €64,000. Moscardini’s works are not illustrations of theory but operational devices—proposals disguised as objects. Law becomes a medium alongside bronze and language. Terms such as res communis omnium shed abstraction and emerge as material presence. It is rare to encounter art that treats legislation as its material. In a fair dominated by ownership, Moscardini imagines the conditions of the unownable.
Maryam Jafri, Home Office ft. Angola, Iraq, Vietnam, Vicodin (2021). Courtesy of the artist and Matteo Cantarella, Copenhagen.
Not far away, Maryam Jafri delivers one of Liste’s sharpest analyses of global capitalism at Matteo Cantarella’s booth. Advertisements from Iraq, Angola, and elsewhere reveal how aspiration is manufactured differently according to geography, while remaining structurally identical (Home Office ft. Angola, Iraq, Vietnam, Vicodin (2021), €20,000). An LG air-conditioner becomes a vehicle for competing fantasies of prosperity. Nearby, branded office supplies associated with cholesterol, anxiety, and depression transform the workstation into a portrait of contemporary labor. The collages from The Everyday Model (2021) track anonymous commercial actors across unrelated campaigns, exposing advertising’s interchangeable bodies (€3,000–€4,000). Particularly striking is the artist’s decision to leave certain commentaries blank, allowing absence itself to function as critique. Jafri turns the visual language of marketing against itself with remarkable precision.
Luis Enrique, Everything leaks, 2025. Installation view at Valerie's Factory booth, Liste Art Fair 2026. Photo: AWC
Valerie’s Factory opened strongly, with works reportedly selling within hours. Luis Enrique Zela Koort’s sculptures combine glass, bronze, resin, and Vatican holy water, blessed by Pope Leo XIV, into elaborate ceremonial architectures. One suspended work resembles an oversized rosary, assembled from marine shells used in ancient Peruvian funerary rituals, collapsing Catholic symbolism and Indigenous cosmologies so that nature itself is rendered as sacred—the work was acquired by an Australian private collection. Equally compelling are the glass wall sculptures depicting the eyes of four Amazonian pollinators (also sold), whose sensual materiality transforms ecological interdependence into optical experience. In dialogue with Ramiro Chaves’s modular, biomorphic forms, Bedoya proposes a spirituality grounded in non-human desire. Together, the artists create an environment where transcendence appears inseparable from biodiversity.
Ju Young Kim’s sculptures recall the aerodynamic romanticism of Isa Genzken at “Unlimited” on the other side of the hall, translated into a distinctly contemporary register. Combining airplane components, automotive fragments, stained glass, and handcrafted elements, her works inhabit the liminal spaces of global mobility. They feel simultaneously futuristic and nostalgic, as though assembled from the emotional residue of airports. Kim understands transit as a condition of identity. Industrial materials encounter traditional symbols without collapsing into easy hybridity; instead, they remain suspended between origins and destinations. The resulting installations are elegant reflections on acceleration, displacement, and belonging. In an art market that seems eager to underline why there is “only one Basel” after extending the fair that shares its name to other cities—saturating art workers and visitors with movement—Kim’s work captures the peculiar melancholy of perpetual transit.
Chathuri Nissansala's works at Niru Ratnam's booth, Liste Art Fair 2026. Photo: AWC
Chathuri Nissansala’s presentation at Niru Ratnam is among Liste’s most affecting exhibitions, and it turns toward another register of movement. Drawing on the legacy of the Sri Lankan civil war, the artist works through damaged objects as sites of ongoing repair. A headless Buddha and a fragment recalling a Madonna statue are reinforced with beadwork and layered tea bags, forming new skins that register devastation alongside incomplete and uneven processes of restoration. Histories of violence here unfold alongside practices of care, without resolving into a single trajectory. New works developed during her Rijksakademie residency revisit colonial illustrations of Sri Lankan subjects, reworking images once produced as assertions of power and dominance. Beads, fabrics, and found materials accumulate into tactile archives of resilience. Nissansala’s practice suggests fragility not as opposition to strength, but as a condition through which political and material relations are continually renegotiated.
Basel Social Club, Goodie bag. Photo: AWC
If Art Basel increasingly resembles a lifestyle brand searching for cultural legitimacy, Basel Social Club has come to function as a parallel proposition rather than a formal opposition. Founded by a constellation of organizers—artist Hannah Weinberger, gallerists Robbie Fitzpatrick and Dominik Müller, and performance curator Yael Salomonowitz—the project unfolds less as a singular event than as a distributed choreography. Durational performance structures the rhythm of the site, extending from interventions in the parking lot by Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo) to Michele Rizzo’s adapted Higher XTC and Esben Weile Kjær’s SUN in the lobby. The connective performative layer is composed of therapy sessions with Anna Zumthor, workout and yoga classes in a former event hall (temporarily repurposed as a gym), DJs, conversations, and incidental encounters, alongside embroidered napkins at the pop-up restaurant reading “Shouldn’t you be Working?”. Rather than separating programmed from unprogrammed activity, the project allows these categories to remain in constant negotiation.
Salomonowitz describes the project through the metaphor of a clockwork. Durational performances activate the building, as do everyday activities that gradually take on performative density. Someone exercising in the gym may become indistinguishable from an artistic performer; a fifteen-minute therapy session can acquire the intensity of a stage. Participation is not imposed but subtly choreographed, and visitors often find themselves already within the script before registering its contours.
A defining feature of Basel Social Club is its capacity to inhabit spaces that traditional institutions tend to bypass. This year’s vast former office complex becomes more than a venue; it reads as an urban proposition. The project repeatedly reopens inaccessible buildings to the public, transforming real estate into a temporary commons. Salomonovitz’s enthusiasm for a mobile organ installed in the parking structure distills this logic: mobility here is less about efficiency than about imagination.
Our conversation inevitably turns toward economics—everything here is driven by a certain form of intuition. Unlike the fairs surrounding it, Basel Social Club is sustained through a precarious mixture of foundations, sponsors, donors, and features tiered participation for galleries. For example, off-spaces pay nothing; established galleries contribute more. These fees cover the costs involved for installation. Yet even this structure remains fragile. As Salomonowitz acknowledges, each edition unfolds somewhere between care and self-exploitation. The team works extraordinary hours, and the familiar question persists: where does commitment end and unpaid labour begin?
Within this fragile balance of exhaustion, what emerges is not cynicism but a sustained commitment to collective practice. The project’s four founders each bring distinct competencies—gallery work, performance, institutional knowledge, local networks—yet hierarchy remains unusually fluid. Decisions emerge through conversation rather than command, which may also explain why the event retains its sense of immediacy. Unlike many cultural initiatives that stabilise into predictability, Basel Social Club preserves a space for improvisation.
Rather than positioning itself as Art Basel’s counterpart, Basel Social Club occupies a parallel register within the city’s ecosystem. The fair provides market infrastructure; Basel Social Club generates experiences that are less easily absorbed by market logics. The relationship is not oppositional but interdependent, with galleries circulating between both contexts and visitors moving fluidly across them.
What Basel Social Club specialises in is neither critique nor escape, but the proposal of a temporary social architecture in which exhibition-making, hospitality, performance, and urban occupation coexist. In a week dominated by transactions, this proposition acquires particular force.
Shamiran Istifan, Camera Lucida, 2026. Installation view at Kendra Jayne Patrick's office space, Basel Social Club. Photo: AWC
The “Office” edition follows “Villa”, “Factory” and “Bank”, expanding this logic on an unusually large scale and producing some of the week’s most compelling ironies, shaped collectively by its participants. Liam Gillick, once selected by Nicolaus Schafhausen for the German Pavilion in Venice, now appears in an underground office environment through the Brussels-based gallery KIN, also founded by Schafhausen—a shift that quietly underscores how easily roles, positions, and institutional alignments can reconfigure within the art world. The relocation reads less as a reversal than as a reminder that artistic meaning shifts with context. Nearby, Kendra Jayne Patrick’s nomadic gallery presents projects that examine value, infrastructure, and capital with notable precision. Rather than treating the office as metaphor, the presentation engages labour itself as exhibition material, acknowledging the systems that sustain artistic production without lapsing into cynicism. The result is one of Basel Social Club’s most incisive interventions. And, as much of it unfolds through circulation and documentation, its clearest register may be found on social media, across the long corridors of four floors.
The most resonant encounters are often reserved for the end, in the “banks” of public wealth: the museum collections. After days spent navigating fairs, parties, and professional obligations, The First Homosexuals at the Kunstmuseum Basel opens onto a different temporality altogether. The exhibition traces the emergence of homosexual identity through art and visual culture with notable nuance, resisting linear or reductive narratives of progress. Outside the museum, the fountain extends the exhibition’s fin-de-siècle atmosphere into the city. In Basel, where swimming and cooling off in public fountains doesn’t cost a 500 euros fine like in Rome, the boundary between tourism and everyday urban life becomes unusually thin. Feet submerged in cold water, the nervous system finally slows. Basel’s art week rarely allows for decompression; here, a relief becomes available. The city’s most valuable luxury turns out to be time without urgency.
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- Cover Image:
Nairy Baghramian, Modèle vivant (S’empilant), 2026. Installation at the Messeplatz during Art Basel in Basel 2026.
