Basel Social Club returns for its fourth edition, inhabiting a former private bank in the center of Grossbasel. In keeping with its tradition of site-specific programming, the 2025 edition engages directly with the building’s symbolic and material past. This year’s theme draws inspiration from the language of finance and exchange, exploring systems of value, commerce, and trade. The resulting exhibition, performance program and culinary options unfold within the bank setting, where boundaries dissolve between currency and care, luxury and necessity, spectacle and service.
Befitting to the curatorial focus on the themes of commerce and trade, the exhibited pieces aim to refer to the complex relationship between these systems of commercial exchange and the supposedly universal systems of value. They offer a dual insight onto how the ever-rising capitalistic paradigm further fuels the imbalance on the axis of the two. Liberty Cursive, 2015-2023, a lightbox installation by Šejla Kamerić, brings into focus the inherent contradictions of those values. It raises questions about who retains the power on the right to liberty and what forces contribute to its gradually eroding definition. In contrast, the carpet pieces by Ivana Ivković, Since I Met You I Have No Peace/No Peace, 2025, evoke the core tension of memory and power. They explore the entanglement of the personal and political, conveying a pervasive sense of social unrest and instability.