Basel Social Club’s Bank

Also at Basel and easily, easily, easily one of my favorite shows of the year, the most fun, one of the most exciting and with the most durable residence in my head still. The show was a basically flawless demonstration that art can be fun and social as well as relational. It can also be where you least expect it: in the staircases, hidden in small corridors, inside and out. But this isn’t relational, like everyone learns to cook a meal. You want a tattoo? Sauna and cold bath? Give blood? Get your fortune told?

Basel Social Club’s 2025 edition, Bank, repurposed the former Vontobel private bank in Grossbasel into a sprawling, site-specific venue, opening more than 100 rooms to the public. The show worked with the building’s symbolic and material past, as the program used the language of finance and exchange to stage an environment where systems of value became legible as social choreography.

One room in particular, Nina Roehrs’ BANKABLE, presented by none other than a bank, Arab Bank Switzerland, sharpened the show’s finance theme into a direct question of ownership in the digital-cum-blockchain age. It brought together fifteen works linking art, money and value through the lens of decentralized blockchain technology. Artists included Rhea Myers, 0xShiroi, Robert Alice, Mitchell F. Chan, Sarah Friend and Sarah Meyohas.

But just step outside that room and—apparent across the exhibition—across performances and various forms of entertainment (food, bar, music), the bank became a maze of opt-in, novel encounters. It became a place to linger, to queue for (for a long time at some points) and to genuinely not forget.